Pioneer Cottage
Pampa, Gray County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1903, one year after county was organized, by settlers Wiley Vincent and wife Katie. This small early Texas cabin has 2 rooms. In 1907, huge prairie fire missed it by only 600 yards. The cabin was bought in 1920 by E. S. Carr, Pampa mayor, 1917-1918 and 1938-1940. He gave it as a wedding present to daughter Edna and her husband Clifford Vincent, a son of the builders. In 1963, the Cliff Vincents gave the cabin for use as a museum to the Pampa Genealogical and Historical Society. It has been furnished with period pieces and restored to original appearance. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1970.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
The modest cabin captures the hardscrabble beginnings of Panhandle settlement, a reminder that even latecomer counties were still frontier at the dawn of the 20th century.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
Woody Guthrie
Pampa, TX
Woody Guthrie, the folk balladeer who would give voice to Depression-era America, spent his formative years in the Panhandle town of Pampa after moving from Oklahoma at seventeen. Working the soda fountain at the Harris Drug Store on this site and devouring books at the city library, he learned guitar and played local events before leaving for California in 1937 and, later, New York. Those Pampa years primed the poet-lyricist whose songs of hard times and the open road became American touchstones.
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.
Gray County 50th Year Anniversary
Pampa, TX
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.