The Square House
Panhandle, Carson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Niedringhaus brothers of St. Louis sent lumber by ox-cart from Dodge City and built this square house on their "N Bar N" Ranch here in Carson County in the mid-1880s. In 1887 a railroad official occupied the pioneer cottage while the Southern Kansas Railway was being extended from Kiowa, Kansas, to Panhandle City. This was later the home of some distinguished settlers: pioneer banker and treasurer of Southern Kansas Railway Company, James Christopher Paul; rancher-judge J. L. Harrison; innkeeper James B. Wilks; and Sheriff Oscar L. Thorp. The oldest house in town, it was purchased in 1965 and restored as the Carson County Museum. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1966
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the mid-1880s the Niedringhaus brothers of St. Louis hauled lumber by ox-cart from Dodge City to raise this simple square house on their N Bar N Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. When the Southern Kansas Railway pushed toward Panhandle City in 1887, a railroad official lived here, and over the years bankers, ranchers, judges, and a sheriff called it home. Now the oldest house in town, it was restored in 1965 as the Carson County Museum.
Why it matters
The Square House embodies the collision of open-range ranching and the arriving railroad that transformed the Panhandle from cattle country into settled towns.
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Related people
- · James Christopher Paul
- · Oscar L. Thorp
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Texas Panhandle Pioneers - The Simms Brothers
Panhandle, TX
The three Simms brothers came to Texas in 1886 and reached this Panhandle county in the early 1900s, arriving after the hunters and soldiers who had cleared the range of buffalo and driven off the Comanche. Unlike the open-range cattlemen before them, these settlers bought their land outright and worked to pay it off, selling buffalo bones and collecting wolf bounties to survive the droughts. In the brutal winter of 1905–1906 they plowed a four-furrow railway firebreak on a hundred-mile trek, singing gospel hymns by the campfire each night.
Finch-Lord-Nelson and the Founding of Panhandle City
Panhandle, TX
As the railroad pushed across the Texas Panhandle in 1887, the cattle firm of Finch, Lord & Nelson—already known for bringing the first Hereford cattle to the region—set out to found Panhandle City. They dispatched ten cowboys to stake claims around the new townsite, which flourished as the county seat. This little red barn is a replica of the frontier structures the firm built for those 1887 claimsmen.
Carson County
Panhandle, TX
Carved out of the vast Texas Panhandle in the years after the Civil War, Carson County was created in 1876 and formally organized in 1888 as ranchers and railroad promoters pushed into the high plains. It took the name of Samuel Price Carson, who served as Secretary of State for the young Republic of Texas. The town of Panhandle became the county seat and, though it lost the great rail junction it was promised to nearby Amarillo, it endured as one of the region's early enduring towns and an early player in the oil and gas boom.
Panhandle
Panhandle, TX
As the buffalo herds vanished and Native peoples were forced onto reservations in the 1880s, the town of Panhandle rose as the region's early capital and, in 1887, the terminus of the Santa Fe Railway. Immigrant trains delivered colonists who plowed the old range into wheat fields, and the town became the seat of Carson County in 1888. Nearby lie the area's first oil well of 1921 and the site of a World War II ordnance plant.