Gray County 50th Year Anniversary
Pampa, Gray County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Lest We Forget; Gray County; 50th Year Anniversary; 1902-1952; Dedicated to our early day pioneers, through whose efforts Gray County was established. And who contributed so much to our 50 years of progress.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This monument, dedicated in 1952, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Gray County's establishment in 1902 and honors the early pioneers whose efforts built it. Its plain, heartfelt inscription — "Lest We Forget" — reflects a mid-century impulse to memorialize the fast-fading generation that first settled the Texas Panhandle. It celebrates fifty years of progress on land that had been open frontier within living memory.
Why it matters
It embodies the way twentieth-century communities paused to honor their founding pioneers, keeping alive the frontier origins of towns that had grown modern in a single lifetime.
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Related events
- · Establishment of Gray County (1902)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Gray County Courthouse
Pampa, TX
After the county seat moved from Lefors in 1928, Gray County raised this Beaux Arts courthouse, designed by W. R. Kaufman & Son of Amarillo and dedicated in 1930. Set on an Indiana limestone foundation, its steel frame and many windows lent a modern feel to the classical Georgian-trimmed design. The same firm shaped Pampa's city hall and fire station in matching style.
Pampa
Pampa, TX
Pampa began in 1888 as a telegraph station on the Southern Kansas Railroad, cycling through the names Glasgow and Sutton before manager George Tyng of the White Deer Land Company named it Pampa. Surveyor A. H. Doucette platted the town in 1902, and its first school, church, and mayor followed over the next decade. A 1920s oil boom transformed the sleepy railroad town, and in 1928 it captured the Gray County seat from Lefors.
Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D.
Pampa, TX
Vittorio von Brunow led an improbably far-flung life — born in North Carolina in 1862, raised in East Prussia, and educated in Vienna and Warsaw before returning to America and reaching the raw Texas Panhandle town of Pampa in 1903. As the area's first physician he built a frame house that doubled as drugstore, post office, and telephone exchange, and rode many miles over dirt roads to reach his patients. He remained active in civic life for decades.
Pioneer Cottage
Pampa, TX
Built in 1903, just a year after Gray County was organized, this two-room cabin housed the pioneering family of Wiley and Katie Vincent on the raw Texas Panhandle. In 1907 a vast prairie fire swept past, missing the little home by only 600 yards. Passed down and preserved, it later became a museum furnished as it was in frontier days.