Clarendon, TX

Clarendon is Donley County's seat on U.S. 287 in the Texas Panhandle, about 60 miles east of Amarillo. Rev. L.H. Carhart established it in 1878 as a temperance-and-education colony and named it for his wife, Clara. The first town sat near Carroll Creek and the Salt Fork of the Red River, but when the Fort Worth and Denver Railway bypassed it in 1887, houses, businesses, and residents moved six miles south to the present site. Clarendon has been a county seat and a railroad town, but its first ambition was to build a place around churches and schooling.

The Saints' Roost Museum keeps that unusual beginning in view. It occupies the former Adair Hospital and holds ranch, farm, business, Native American, Red River War, and JA Ranch material, along with the restored 1887 railroad depot. Clarendon College, founded in 1898 and later re-established as a junior college, remains the oldest higher-education institution in the Texas Panhandle. Clarendon is a small Panhandle city with a courthouse-town role, a moved railroad history, and an old temperance nickname that still makes the local story easy to remember.