DUANE
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Duane's take
The marker's the authority, and here's how I tell it. Picture the Texas Panhandle, late December, 1887. Christmas Day, of all days, and a man named L.
G. Conner is out there locating a survey. Not sitting by a fire, not passing biscuits around a table.
Locating a survey. On Christmas Day. That right there tells you something about the kind of people who built this part of Texas.
From that survey came what the marker calls a half-dugout, with windows set right at ground level. Half in the earth, half reaching for the sky, the way a lot of big things start out humble. This was the first home in Canyon.
Not a fine house with a parlor, not a hotel with a brass bell at the front desk. A dugout. And yet, what happened inside those walls would shape a whole county.
Canyon's first post office was located right here. Mail coming in and going out of a hole in the ground. Then, sometime after that dugout went up, a child was born there.
Mamie Conner. The first white child born in all of Randall County. And if that wasn't enough for one little half-dugout to carry, in 1889 the election to organize the county was held here too.
The votes that turned scattered ranches and wind-scoured prairie into an official county on the map, cast right there where the windows sat level with the dirt. L. G.
Conner located a survey on Christmas Day, and what grew out of that ground was a post office, a birthplace, and the organizing vote of a whole county. Not bad for a place you had to look down to find the windows.
What the marker says
First home in Canyon, a half-dugout, with windows at ground level. Built on survey located Christmas Day, 1887, by L. G. Conner. Location of Canyon's first post office; birthplace of Mamie Conner, first white child born in county. 1889 election to organize the county was held here. (1966)