Ozark Trails Association

Founded in 1913 to mark and promote an automobile route across several states, the Ozark Trails Association was the brainchild of William Hope Harvey of Arkansas, who wanted to improve roads to his Ozark mountain retreat. Thousands of members from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri attended annual meetings of the association, which also sought to promote tourism and educate the public to the need for better highways and roads. The southern route of the Ozark Trail extended across the Texas panhandle through Collingsworth, Childress, Hall, Briscoe, Swisher, Castro and Parmer counties. In 1920, members from these Texas counties and two New Mexico counties met and voted to follow the lead of the national group in placing reinforced concrete signposts along the route in their counties. James E. Swepston of Tulia led this effort and was elected president of the national association at its 1920 annual meeting. The concrete obelisk placed in Tulia (85 feet northwest) originally denoted the distance from Tulia to various towns on the trail. It retains its identity as a local landmark, and in 2000, the Texas Historical Commission designated the Ozark Trail marker as a State Archeological Landmark. The obelisk also is a reminder of the Ozark Trails Association (disbanded in 1924), one of many private highway associations to sponsor automobile routes before the federal government began numbering and marking such highways after World War I. (2001).