Reagan County
Big Lake, Reagan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Tom Green County; created March 7, 1903, organized April 20, 1903. Named in honor of John H. Reagan 1818-1905. Indian fighter and surveyor member of Texas Legislature and United States Congress postmaster general of the southern Confederacy. County seat, Stiles 1903-1925, Big Lake since.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Reagan County was carved from Tom Green County and organized in 1903 as ranching and, later, oil pushed settlement across the West Texas plains. It honors John H. Reagan (1818-1905), an Indian fighter, surveyor, and long-serving Texas congressman who became Postmaster General of the Confederacy and later a founding force of the Texas Railroad Commission. The county seat moved from Stiles to Big Lake in 1925.
Why it matters
The county's creation captures the last wave of West Texas settlement, and its namesake links that frontier era to the Confederacy and to the regulation of the railroads that opened the region.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Reagan County was born in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Carved from Tom Green County, it was created on March 7, 1903, and organized weeks later on April 20 — a fresh square of West Texas plains getting its own government just as the last frontier was being settled and fenced.
The country here is the wide, dry, big-sky ranchland of the Permian Basin, where distances are long and settlement came late. When Reagan County was organized, ranching still defined the land, and towns were small and far apart. The county seat began at a place called Stiles, a hopeful little settlement that expected to grow with the county around it.
But the plains of West Texas held a secret underground that would soon rewrite the region's future entirely. Within two decades of the county's founding, the age of ranching would give way to the age of oil — and the balance of the whole county would shift.
People & events
The county honors John H. Reagan (1818–1905), one of the towering Texas figures of the nineteenth century. His inscription runs through a remarkable life: Indian fighter and surveyor on the early frontier, member of the Texas Legislature and later the United States Congress, and Postmaster General of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Reagan's story did not end with the war. Captured along with Confederate president Jefferson Davis in 1865 and imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston harbor, he wrote a famous open letter urging his fellow Texans to accept the war's outcome, including the end of slavery. In his later years he became the first chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, the body created to regulate the railroads whose power had come to dominate the state and nation.
The county named for him tells its own tale of change. Its original seat, Stiles, was bypassed as growth gathered elsewhere, and in 1925 the seat of government moved to Big Lake, where it has remained. The reason for that shift lay just beneath the surface: in May 1923, the Santa Rita No. 1 well came in on University of Texas lands in the county, striking oil.
Its place in the American story
Reagan County ties together three great strands of the American story in one place. Its 1903 creation captures the final chapter of Western settlement, when the frontier was closing and even the emptiest stretches of Texas were being organized into counties. Its namesake links that frontier to the drama of the Civil War and the long argument over the railroads that reshaped the national economy.
And its ground holds one of the pivotal moments in American energy history. The Santa Rita No. 1 gusher of 1923 opened up the vast oil wealth of the Permian Basin and poured fortune into the Permanent University Fund, helping to build the state's public universities. A remote West Texas county thus became part of the story of how oil transformed the nation — its economy, its wars, its daily life.
John Reagan's own career, meanwhile, embodies the American habit of second acts. A leader of the losing side in the Civil War became a builder of one of the country's first great experiments in regulating private industry in the public interest. Few single names connect so many chapters of the national story at once.
If you visit
This is a landmark marker on the open West Texas plains, and the landscape itself is half the experience. Come expecting big distances, big skies, and the particular quiet of ranch and oil country around Big Lake. The marker rewards a reader who likes a life story compressed into a few dense lines.
For a real sense of the county's changing fortunes, look toward the old seat at Stiles, north of Big Lake, where the abandoned former courthouse still stands — a stately building left behind when the county's center of gravity shifted. It's a quietly dramatic sight, a monument to a town that bet on one future and watched a different one arrive.
Oil buffs and history travelers alike can seek out the marker commemorating the Santa Rita No. 1 well site, the discovery that changed everything here; the original rig itself was later moved to the University of Texas in Austin. Taken together — the namesake's marker, the ghostly old courthouse, and the well that struck oil — Reagan County makes a memorable stop for anyone road-tripping the wide-open Permian Basin.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · John H. Reagan
Themes & tags
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