Settles Hotel
Big Spring, Howard County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Will R. and Lillian Settles built this hotel after the discovery of oil on their ranch in 1927. The grand opening was October 1, 1930. Designed by David Castle (1884-1956), the 15-story brick highrise was for many years the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso. Under construction for one year, the hotel boasted 150 guest rooms, grand public rooms, office and retail space, furnished apartments, restaurants, ballrooms, and a private club on the top floor. Although the Settles family operated the hotel for only two years, it remained open under new ownership. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1987
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When oil was struck on the Settles ranch in 1927, Will and Lillian Settles poured their new fortune into this fifteen-story hotel, which opened in grand style on October 1, 1930. Designed by David Castle, it was for years the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, with 150 rooms, ballrooms, restaurants, and a private club crowning the top floor. Though the family ran it for only two years, the skyscraper stood as a bold emblem of West Texas oil-boom optimism.
Why it matters
It embodies the sudden wealth and soaring ambition the oil boom brought to small West Texas towns.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1920s, the ranchlands of West Texas were a country of big skies, hard weather, and cattle — a place where a family measured its worth in acres and rainfall. Then came the oil.
The discovery of petroleum beneath the plains rewrote the region's fortunes almost overnight. Ranchers who had scratched a living from dry grassland suddenly found themselves sitting atop wealth that eastern financiers could only envy. Towns that had been little more than rail stops swelled with roughnecks, speculators, and dreamers.
It was the tail end of the era of American optimism that historians call the Progressive and Modern age — a time when a skyscraper was the truest symbol a community could raise to announce that it had arrived. Across the country, cities competed to build higher. Out here, on the flat and windswept plains, a tower reaching fifteen stories into the sky would have been visible for miles, a beacon of what oil money could do.
People & events
Will R. and Lillian Settles were ranch people whose land, as it turned out, held oil. When the strike came in 1927, they did not simply bank the money. They dreamed upward.
The couple poured their fortune into a hotel unlike anything the region had seen — and hired David Castle, an architect whose working life spanned the years 1884 to 1956, to design it. What Castle drew was audacious: a fifteen-story brick high-rise built in a single year, crowned by a private club on the top floor and packed with 150 guest rooms, grand public halls, restaurants, ballrooms, furnished apartments, and space for offices and shops.
The grand opening arrived on October 1, 1930 — the beginning of a decade the whole nation would remember for its hardship, as the crash of the previous autumn hardened into the Great Depression. The timing was cruel. The Settles family operated their showpiece for only two years before it passed to new owners, though the building itself stayed open and stood on.
Its place in the American story
The story of this tower is the story of the American oil boom in miniature — the sudden, dizzying transfer of wealth that reshaped the map of the country in the early twentieth century. Fortunes that had taken generations to build elsewhere were made here in a season.
What makes the place so telling is what the newly rich chose to do with their money: they built vertically, defiantly, in a landscape that stretches flat to the horizon. A skyscraper on the plains is not a practical necessity; it is a statement. It says that a small place believes itself destined for greatness.
That the family held the hotel for only two years, and that its opening coincided with the nation's slide into the Depression, only deepens the meaning. It stands as a monument both to boom-time ambition and to how quickly fortune can turn — a single grand gesture caught between the roar of the 1920s and the long hard years that followed.
If you visit
Come at it the way travelers have for generations: look up. On a plain this flat, a tall brick tower dominates the eye from far off, and the first thing to feel is the sheer improbability of it rising here at all.
Study the brickwork and the proportions — the confident lines of a building meant to impress, from an age when a hotel wanted to be the grandest room its guests had ever entered. Imagine the top-floor club looking out over country that runs unbroken to the edge of sight.
It sits along the great east–west corridor that carries road travelers across West Texas, an easy pause on a longer drive. Stand at its base, feel the wind that never quite stops out here, and picture the oil-boom optimism that once believed a town like this could touch the sky.
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
- · Will R. Settles
- · Lillian Settles
- · David Castle
Themes & tags
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