W. F. Scarborough Home,

Midland, TX

Before 1884, the young town of Midland had to ship its drinking water fifty miles by rail from Monahans — a costly, precarious lifeline on the arid Staked Plains. That year residents dug this well by hand, six feet across and fifty feet deep, and fitted it with a pump and a trough that watered both townspeople and their cattle. For a spell it supplied the entire community, turning a rail-dependent camp into a place that could stand on its own.

Midland, TX

When Midland's first post office opened on January 4, 1884, with Charles H. Welch as postmaster, settlers wanted to call the town Midway because it stood halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso. Learning that name was already taken, they settled on Midland instead. The office moved four times before returning in 1974 to its original site at 108 East Missouri, by which point it served a postal region of some 32,000 square miles.

Midland, TX

Midland sits where old cattle trails once crossed and where, tradition holds, the last Comanche raid into Texas passed. The Texas and Pacific Railroad reached the spot in 1881, and its position halfway between El Paso and Fort Worth gave the town its name. Sheep and Hereford cattle came first, then farmers drawn by windmill-pumped water—until the 1928 Permian Basin oil discovery made Midland the headquarters of a booming petroleum empire.

Midland, TX

Rancher and merchant Z. Taylor Brown brought his family to Midland in 1884 and had this home built in 1899, complete with carved woodwork, an art-glass window, and three fireplaces sharing a single chimney. Believed to be the oldest dwelling in Midland, it stayed in the Brown family for seventy years, passing to daughter Sara Brown Dorsey. It survives as a rare piece of the town's frontier beginnings.