Santa Fe Building
Amarillo, Potter County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1928-30 at a cost of $1,500,000, this structure was designed by Santa Fe Railroad Architect E.A. Harrison. The 14-story building was the tallest in Amarillo until the 1970's, and housed the offices and division headquarters of the Santa Fe Railroad. A significant local example of the skyscraper form ornamented with Gothic revival style detailing, this edifice is among the few remaining such buildings in the state. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1996
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the Santa Fe Railroad raised this 14-story tower in Amarillo between 1928 and 1930, it planted a piece of big-city ambition on the Texas Panhandle plains. Designed by railroad architect E.A. Harrison and dressed in Gothic Revival detailing, it housed the line's division headquarters and stood as Amarillo's tallest building for four decades. It remains one of the few surviving early skyscrapers of its kind in the state.
Why it matters
The building marks the era when railroads were the economic backbone of the American West, powerful enough to stamp a metropolitan skyline onto a young cattle-country city.
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Related people
- · E.A. Harrison
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, The Amarillo Story
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The arrival of a railroad across the Panhandle gave rise to Amarillo, made county seat of Potter County in 1887, and for a decade the town enjoyed a trade monopoly over the South Plains, ranking as the nation's largest rural cattle-shipping point in the 1890s. When a rival routing threatened to bypass it in 1898, citizens persuaded the Santa Fe to make Amarillo the terminus of its new line; the railroad then moved its headquarters there and, by 1908, folded the town into its transcontinental main line. Branch lines followed, cementing Amarillo as the commercial hub of the High Plains.
Amarillo
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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
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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.
A.T. & S.F. No. 5000 "Madam Queen"
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