Vernon Drugstore
Vernon, Wilbarger County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Oldest drugstore in county. Founded 1882 in a dugout. First building (1884) housed office of Dr. H. H. Rhoads, co-owner and 40 years county health officer. First newspaper in county, the "Vernon Hornet", had its shop in the store building. Passing by were horse-drawn streetcars. Present building erected 1901. Store filled its 1,000,000th prescription in 1958. Customers include first Anglo-American born in Wilbarger County. (Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1966.)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Wilbarger County's oldest drugstore opened in 1882 in a dugout before moving into its first proper building in 1884, which also housed Dr. H. H. Rhoads—co-owner and the county health officer for forty years. The same building sheltered the county's first newspaper, the Vernon Hornet, as horse-drawn streetcars rattled past outside. The present building went up in 1901, and by 1958 the store had filled its millionth prescription.
Why it matters
From dugout to century-old fixture, the drugstore charts the maturing of a frontier county seat into a settled Texas town.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · H. H. Rhoads
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Thaddeus Edgar Johnson
Vernon, TX
A lawyer and World War I veteran, T. Edgar Johnson relocated his family from Breckenridge to Vernon and, in 1930, opened the Johnson-Davis Ford Company at this spot. In an era when the automobile was reshaping rural Texas, the dealership not only survived the Great Depression but became a leading regional transportation business for three decades. Johnson also poured himself into civic life, serving on the Pease River Flood Control District and leading the Vernon Chamber of Commerce as its 1937 president.
Waggoner-Hicks House
Vernon, TX
Spottswood Lomax, a founder of the famed Matador and Espuela (Spur) ranches, built a Queen Anne house on this spot in 1890, at the height of the great Texas cattle empires. Around the turn of the century the prominent cattleman W. T. "Tom" Waggoner remodeled it in the Colonial Revival style and deeded it to his son, banker Guy Leslie Waggoner. In 1907 it passed to farmer and oil investor E. P. Hicks, whose family held it for sixty years — a chain of owners tracing the region's shift from cattle to banking to oil.
Lockett Community
Lockett Community, TX
Named for the Lockett families who settled here in 1888, this Wilbarger County farming community grew from a scattering of pioneer homesteads into a network of schools, churches, cotton gins, blacksmith shops, and general stores. Farming that began behind a yoke of oxen gave way over the decades to modern tractor equipment, and the Lockett Seed Company grew into a hub later acquired by Pioneer Hi-Bred as a cotton-breeding headquarters. Consolidating school districts and a Texas A&M agricultural research center capped the community's evolution across nearly a century.
Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Substation No. 12, Home of Hybrid Sorghums
Chillicothe, TX
On this forage-crop station in 1909, scientists planted the first Sudan grass grown in the United States — seed the Department of Agriculture had carried all the way from Khartoum. What followed was more than half a century of patient sorghum breeding under researchers like A. B. Conner, J. R. Quinby, and J. C. Stephens, culminating in hybrid seed that dramatically boosted yields. Their work reshaped farming across the semiarid Great Plains.