Potter County
Amarillo, Potter County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Young and Bexar Territories. Created August 21, 1876. Organized August 30, 1887. Named in Honor of Robert Potter 1800-1842. Signer of the Declaration of Independence. Secretary of the Navy. Senator in the Texas Congress, 1840. Amarillo, County Seat
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Potter County was carved from earlier territories and created in 1876, though it was not fully organized until 1887, with Amarillo as its seat. It honors Robert Potter (1800–1842), a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence who served as Secretary of the Navy and later as a senator in the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The marker ties a remote Panhandle county to the founding drama of Texas independence.
Why it matters
It shows how the young Republic of Texas stamped its revolutionary founders onto the map of a still-unsettled West decades before those lands were organized.
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Related people
- · Robert Potter
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Potter County, Establishing of
Amarillo, TX
The land that became Potter County lay in country ranged by Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa peoples and crossed by old Spanish and trail routes, including the Great Spanish Road of 1786 and the Fort Smith–Santa Fe Trail followed by 1849 gold seekers. Created by the legislature in 1876 while still empty, it saw Indigenous peoples forced out and buffalo replaced by longhorns, the great LX and barbed-wire Frying Pan ranches established, and finally organized by cowboy voters in 1887. Named for Republic of Texas official Robert Potter, it later gave up the vast Panhandle-Hugoton gas field and holds the Alibates flint quarries worked by prehistoric peoples as early as 10,000 B.C.
Henry B. Sanborn
Amarillo, TX
In 1875 Henry B. Sanborn became the Texas sales agent for Joseph Glidden's newly patented barbed wire, arriving as ranchers and farmers fought over whether the open range should be fenced. Sanborn bought thousands of acres to prove barbed wire could enclose vast holdings, and in 1881 partnered with Glidden to build the famous Frying Pan Ranch, ringed by 120 miles of wire. His promotion of the Amarillo townsite later earned him the title "Father of Amarillo."
Amarillo
Amarillo, TX
When the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad pushed through the Panhandle in 1887, Colorado City merchants led by J. T. Berry platted Amarillo to serve their South Plains trade, and cowboys elected it the seat of newly organized Potter County. Ranchers J. F. Glidden and H. B. Sanborn of the Frying Pan Ranch soon lured residents to a new townsite addition, and from 1892 to 1897 Amarillo was the nation's largest rural cattle-shipping point. Sanborn's maneuvering to win a key rail junction in 1898 sealed the town's future as the commercial center of the Texas Panhandle.
Henry Bradley Sanborn
Amarillo, TX
A New York native, Henry Bradley Sanborn came to Texas in 1875 as sales agent for barbed-wire inventor Joseph Glidden, and together they founded the vast Frying Pan Ranch in 1881 to prove that wire fencing could tame the open range. When a rival site won the county seat, the undaunted Sanborn developed his own townsite nearby, luring residents there after heavy rains flooded the original and later securing the rail connections that guaranteed Amarillo's future. On this spot stood his home, offices, stables for matched coach horses, and even a deer park.