Upton County
Rankin, Upton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Tom Green County. Created February 26, 1887, organized May 7, 1910. Named in honor of John Cunningham Upton 1828-1862, a distinguished Confederate officer killed at Manassas, August 30, 1862. County Seat, Upland, 1910-1921, Rankin, since. A cattle and sheep raising county. Oil wells dot the county.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carved from Tom Green County and created in 1887, Upton County was not fully organized until 1910. It honors John Cunningham Upton, a distinguished Confederate officer killed at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862. A land of cattle and sheep ranches, the county later saw oil wells rise across its range, and its seat moved from Upland to Rankin in 1921.
Why it matters
The county's story ties together Civil War memory, open-range ranching, and the twentieth-century oil boom that together shaped West Texas.
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Related people
- · John Cunningham Upton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Rankin Cemetery
Rankin, TX
Founded in 1915 by civic leaders including Ira Yates and Dr. J. H. Johnson soon after the town of Rankin took shape, this cemetery received its first burial—Johnson's young niece—in 1916. Its graves multiplied in the 1920s as oil strikes in Upton and Pecos counties swelled the local population. Among its residents, tradition holds, lie the unmarked graves of two bank robbers.
Reagan County
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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.
O. W. Parker Ranch Headquarters
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O. W. Parker arrived in Crockett County in 1902 as a ranch hand and slowly built holdings of his own on the vast West Texas range. When the 1926 discovery of the Yates oil field showered the region with new wealth, Parker built this fine Spanish Colonial Revival home, completed in 1930 and known for the orchards and gardens his wife Mildred tended.
City of Big Lake
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Big Lake took its name from a rain-fed depression that was once the only fresh water between the Concho River and Fort Stockton — a campsite for Native peoples, traders, and cattle drivers before it became the largest dry lake in Texas. The Orient Land Company platted the town along the railroad, and it grew from a stockpen and grocery in 1911 to the seat of Reagan County by 1925. Oil and gas later made it a regional energy center.