WHERE TO PLAY

Copper Breaks State Park is a state park in Hardeman County, located approximately 30mi west of Vernon. It covers 1,898.8 acres and contains two small lakes and 10mi of trails. Originally, Copper Breaks was part of the land held by the Comanche and Kiowa. Comanche mound sites can be found in Hardeman County just outside of Vernon, but not in the park itself. Purchased from a private landowner in 1970, the state park opened to the public in 1974.

A short drive north of Vernon lies a humble adobe building that remains a touchstone of the Texas cowboy culture. In 1881 the first Wilbarger County settlers, the Doan family, built a store and home near a low-water crossing of the Red River. They catered to cowhands herding longhorns up the Great Western Trail, America’s longest cattle trail. Doan’s Crossing proved the last chance for drovers to get mail and supplies before entering Indian Territory. Each year since 1884, the public celebrates that trail-driving past at the store with a May Day picnic, the state’s oldest continuing event. A granite monument boasts famous ranch brands. 

This mural is of a local legend, Harvey Dean.  Harvey Dean was an African American entrepreneur who sold tamales on the corner of Wilbarger Street and Main Street to raise money to put his children through college.  His story is one we are so proud to tell!  This mural was completed by Ferdine Le Blanc.

Vernon became the Hibiscus Capital of Texas in 2021.  We had to have a mural to represent this accomplishment and all the hard work Robert Brown did to make the Hibiscus breeding program at Texas A&M AgriLife Research performed by Dariusz Malinowski a prominent program for the center and Vernon. This mural was created by artist Selena Mize.

A few miles east of Quanah, four cone-shaped erosion mounds occupy landscape south of U.S. 287. These mounds, known today as the Medicine Mounds, permit a birds-eye view of the surrounding area for more than sixty miles. The mounds were an ideal campsite for the archaic hunter-gather groups as well as the Plains Indians, who arrived in the late 1700s. Because the mounds had abundant spring water, the site was a favorite camp ground for hunting, that gathering of medicinal plants, and for worship. The Comanche Nation considers two of these mounds to be sacred: the tallest mound, Medicine Mound; and the second tallest, Cedar Mound. It was here that Comanche braves came for vision quest – a ritual where the young man isolated himself from him tribe and sought communication with nature and the spirit world. At this point, Comanche and other peoples would gather medicinal plants to maintain their health. Today, Native-Americans continue this practice and return to such sites to gather the necessary plants and herbs, as well as to seek spiritual guidance. In what was once the great buffalo – and therefore Comanche and Kiowa – range between Pease River and the Red River in Hardeman County, stand a line of four rounded hills called Medicine Mounds. They are extraordinarily conspicuous, the cones rising about 350 feet above the surrounding plain. Flanking them to the west is the gully-washed scar of an ancient buffalo trail. Round about are yet to be picked up Indian arrowheads of flint. The gypsum waters of a spring at the base of one mound drunk by sick Indians as a psychic. To the mounds pertains a legend common in the county. On top of the highest of the four is the flat cap-rock, a protector against erosion. It was, the Indians believed, the dwelling place of a powerful land benevolent spirit. Here the spirit could view the country for miles and miles on all sides, and from this lofty point of vantage, he was wont to direct the arrows of hunters to the vitals of buffaloes and to deflect those of enemies shot at his wards, the Comanches. – J. Frank Dobie, “Stories in Texas Place Names,” Straight Texas, pp. 32

*Spooky seasonal fun!*