Staked Plains
Midland, Midland County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First newspaper published in Midland County. Printed in 1885 in frame building once on this site. Copies were hand-set and hand printed at rate of 5 per hour on old-style press. County court proceedings were printed at .75 cent per square inch. J. C. Rathbun was editor and publisher. (1970)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Staked Plains was the first newspaper published in Midland County, printed in 1885 from a frame building on this site. Each copy was hand-set and hand-printed on an old-style press at a rate of about five per hour, and the paper carried county court proceedings at three-quarters of a cent per square inch. J.C. Rathbun served as its editor and publisher.
Why it matters
A frontier newspaper was often the first sign that a raw settlement meant to become a real town, giving West Texas a voice and a public record of its own.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1885 the flat, treeless expanse of West Texas known as the Staked Plains, or Llano Estacado, was one of the last great open spaces in the country to be settled. For generations it had been considered too dry and too featureless for towns. Then the railroad pushed across the region, and suddenly water stops and section houses along the tracks began to grow into settlements.
Midland was one of those raw new places, a cluster of frame buildings on a vast horizon. The nation as a whole was in its booming post-Civil War decades, an age of railroads, invention, and rapid town-building, and West Texas was catching the tail end of that wave.
Into this half-formed community, in a simple frame building, came a printing press.
People & events
The Staked Plains was the first newspaper published in Midland County, and its very existence in 1885 was an act of frontier ambition. J. C. Rathbun served as editor and publisher, doing the work that in a bigger city would have taken a whole staff.
The physical labor behind each issue is almost hard to imagine today. Every copy was hand-set, letter by letter, and hand-printed on an old-style press that turned out only about five sheets an hour. A single edition represented hours of patient, aching work at the type case and the press lever.
The paper also earned its keep as a public record, printing the county court's proceedings, sold by the square inch at a posted rate. That was more than a business arrangement. It meant the doings of local government were set in type where any citizen could read them.
Its place in the American story
Across the American West, the arrival of a newspaper was one of the surest signs that a settlement intended to become a real, permanent town rather than a passing camp. A press meant someone was betting that this place had a future worth recording.
A local paper did work that held a young community together. It carried the news, advertised the merchants, argued the issues, and, by printing official proceedings, created a public record that let ordinary people keep an eye on their government. In that sense a frontier weekly was a small engine of democracy, giving a remote place a voice and a memory of its own.
The slow, hand-cranked labor behind the Staked Plains stands for thousands of similar presses that helped turn scattered western settlements into a connected nation.
If you visit
Stand here and let the scale of the surrounding country sink in first. This is the edge of the Llano Estacado, a landscape so wide and level that early travelers supposedly marked their routes just to keep from getting lost. Against that immensity, the idea of one person hand-setting a newspaper feels heroic.
There is no press to see now, only the marker and the site where the frame building once stood, so the visit is really an act of imagination. Picture the click of type dropping into a composing stick and the rhythmic pull of the press turning out five pages an hour.
It is a rewarding pause on any drive through Midland, a reminder that the modern West Texas city around you began as a place raw enough that its first newspaper had to be made almost entirely by hand.
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
- · J.C. Rathbun
Themes & tags
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