Miami, Texas

Everything Miami is known for

2 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Miami

Songs About Miami

canadian river waltx
R.W. Hampton
20%
Those Feat’ll Steer Ya Wrong Sometimes
Little Feat
5%
"Athens, Gouldbusk, Troy, and Miami"

Artists From Miami

R
Ricky Chilton
country

Rivers & Roads in Song near Miami

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Miami.

Canadian River 7 songs U.S. Route 66 19 songs Highway I 40 20 songs

Musical Heritage

Coney Island Cafe RoadyGoat

1933

At 114 West Foster Avenue in Pampa, the Coney Island Cafe has been serving since 1933 — opened by a Greek immigrant named Bill Coronis, and still built around a yellow Formica counter lined with red swivel stools. A chili dog will run you a buck seventy-five. But that counter has a real claim to fame: it was Woody Guthrie's favorite place to eat in all of Pampa. Same yellow Formica. Same red stools. And somewhere along it, one of the great American songwriters used to sit down for lunch. Ninety years on, they'll still pour you a coffee and slide you a chili dog in a room Woody Guthrie loved.

RoadyGoat → · 19.2 mi away

Pampa's Tribute to Woody Guthrie and the 'This Land Is Your Land' sculpture RoadyGoat

Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land," and Pampa, Texas, decided that song deserved a monument. Back in nineteen ninety-two, when the city leaders wouldn't back a tribute, two women — Thelma Bray and Glenna Lea Miller — went and built one anyway, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Guthrie's death. Governor Ann Richards proclaimed a Woody Guthrie Day across Texas. His own sister came and spoke, and a hundred Pampa schoolkids stood up and sang his songs. And a welder named Rusty Neef took carbon steel and forged the actual notes of "This Land Is Your Land" into a sculpture — a hundred and forty-two feet of melody laid out in East Coronado Park. It used to glow at night off the highway, till vandals smashed the floodlights. The song's still out there. It never needed the lights.

RoadyGoat → · 19.2 mi away

Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center RoadyGoat

2003

Woody Guthrie learned to play guitar in Pampa, Texas — up in the Panhandle — while he was working the soda fountain at the Harris Drug Store. That building's still standing at 320 South Cuyler Street, and it's a museum now: the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center. Funny thing is, the building itself is about the only Guthrie artifact in it. The real treasures are on loan from his daughter Nora — photos, letters, lyrics, paintings. A woman named Thelma Bray got the museum open to the public back in 2003, with Pete Seeger playing a benefit concert to fund the restoration. Thelma just turned a hundred years old this past June. And every Friday night, folks still bring their instruments down and pick together in the room where Woody figured it out.

RoadyGoat → · 19.2 mi away

Woody Guthrie's years in Pampa RoadyGoat

Before he was the voice of the Dust Bowl, Woody Guthrie was a teenager in a Panhandle oil town. His father called him to Pampa at seventeen to help run a cot house for roughnecks on Cuyler Street. He dropped out of high school and taught himself at the public library — twelve books at a time. He claimed a guitar somebody had abandoned in the storeroom of Harris Drug, and his uncle Jeff, a fiddle-playing deputy, showed him the chords. He wrote his first songs here and married a local girl. Then, April fourteenth, 1935, the sky went black with topsoil. In the exodus that followed, Guthrie wrote "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," and lit out for California. His records would go on to inspire a whole folk revival — Seeger, Dylan, all of them — a couple of decades down the road.

RoadyGoat → · 19.2 mi away

History of Miami

Harnessing the Panhandle Wind RoadyGoat

Look out your window at the horizon around Miami. Those giant, slowly spinning turbines are more than just landmarks; they are feats of modern engineering perfectly suited to this exact spot. The Texas Panhandle is one of the best places on earth for wind power because the wind is not only strong, but consistent. The flat, treeless terrain of the High Plains offers no obstruction, allowing for a smooth, harvestable flow of air. Engineers and meteorologists use extensive data to site these turbines, calculating optimal placement for maximum energy capture without creating turbulence for neighboring turbines. Each blade, often over 150 feet long, is a complex airfoil, like an airplane wing, designed to generate lift and turn the rotor. This is the 21st-century version of a cash crop for Miami, transforming a relentless force of nature—the wind—into a predictable and profitable source of renewable energy.

RoadyGoat →

The Courthouse on the Prairie RoadyGoat

The most impressive building in Miami, by far, is the Roberts County Courthouse — and it stands here only because Miami won a nine-year brawl. When the county organized in January 1889, Miami carried the county-seat election. That December the vote was thrown out as fraudulent and the seat went to Parnell, a town backed by the Cresswell Land and Cattle Company for its central position near the ranch. Miami's argument was the railroad. For nine years the two towns wrangled, and the fight got so hot over where the county records belonged that Texas Rangers were called in to keep the peace. Miami finally won the deciding election in 1898. Parnell's post office closed, its people moved off to Miami and Canadian and Pampa, and the town vanished. In 1913 Miami built this Classical Revival courthouse, designed by Elmer George Withers — a stone statement, on a landscape of nothing but grass, that the argument was finally over.

RoadyGoat →

Woody Guthrie and the Black Duster RoadyGoat

In the 1930s, Pampa was home to a young, struggling sign-painter and musician named Woody Guthrie. He lived here during the worst years of the Dust Bowl, an experience that would forge his identity as America's greatest folk singer. On April 14, 1935, a day that came to be known as 'Black Sunday,' a terrifying wall of black dust, a mile high and moving at 60 miles per hour, engulfed Pampa. It turned day into night and filled the air with static electricity. People huddled in their homes, thinking it was the end of the world. Guthrie, trapped with friends and neighbors, later turned that fear and apocalyptic awe into a song: 'So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh.' The song's dusty verses and dark humor capture a moment when the people of Pampa truly thought they had to 'kiss and go.' It’s a piece of American history born directly from the soil and sky of this town.

RoadyGoat → · 19.0 mi away

Miami Mammoth Kill Site

1933

In 1933, a local farmer plowing a wheat field began uncovering large, chalky bones. Knowing them to be too large to be cow or buffalo bones, several area residents, including county judge and amateur archeologist J.A. Mead, investigated the site and made a significant discovery; a man-made stone artifact was found alongside the bones of what were mammoth elephants. The investigators identified the artifact as a Clovis fluted spear point, similar to items discovered in 1932 at the Blackwater draw site near Clovis, New Mexico. In 1934, Dr. E. H. Sellards of the University of Texas became involved. Securing funding through the Works Progress Administration, he led an extended excavation of the Miami site beginning in 1937. Landowner C.R. Cowan asked only that the site be refilled following the dig. 
 Known initially as the C.R. Cowan site, the Miami site was found to be a playa lake filled with blue clay up to about two feet below ground level. The clay had formed from vegetation that once the pond. The remains of three to five adult mammoths, as well as the bones of at least one baby mammoth, were found at this site. Among the bones were man-made hunting tools, such as a spear point found less three inches from a mammoth’s atlas vertebra. Archeologists found two other spear points and hide scraping tool. 
 The artifacts alongside the bones indicate that the animals were killed at a watering hole. The evidence is significant, showing the contemporary existence of man and mammoth in North America. It also demonstrates that early man was an efficient, experienced hunter, information that has been used in the debate over the causes of extinction of late Pleistocene era animals approximately 12,000 years ago. The site remains one of the most significant early man sites in North America. (2003)

Historical Marker →

Mammoth Hunting

11500

The Southern Plains area of Texas at the close of the Pleistocene was a vast stretch of grasslands from the northern Panhandle to beyond Val Verde and eastward to the coastal plains. This region had an abundant water supply and a richly diverse animal population. Winters were milder and summers cooler than in modern times. Within this equitable setting, people of the Clovis period, between 11,500 and 11,000 years B.P., killed and butchered their prey around playas and along streams and rivers. These people are best known for their distinctive fluted projectile points and the hunting of mammoths. In reality their bone technology was equally as significant as their knowledge and craftsmanship in stone tool making. They also had a broad-based, meat-related subsistence based on opportunistic or eclectic foraging for a variety of animals rather than being focused on the mammoth. The classic man-mammoth sites are on the Southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico and include Miami, near Miami, Texas; Blackwater Draw Locality No. 1, near Clovis, New Mexico; Lubbock Lake National Historic and State Archeological Landmark , on the outskirts of Lubbock; Bonfire Shelter , close to the Rio Grande near Langtry; and Duewall-Newberry, on the Brazos River near Bryan. Of these sites, two (Miami and Blackwater Draw Locality No. 1) yielded Clovis points in association with mammoth remains. The other sites contained mammoth remains perhaps modified by man but no Clovis points. Clovis peoples seem to have been skilled hunters well-versed in mammoth-herd behavior; they used that knowledge and their technology to confront, contain, and kill small family units of three to five animals at sites such as Lubbock Lake and Miami. Exactly how this was accomplished is still a subject of debate. If indeed mammoths behaved as modern African elephants do, then the key would be in the killing first of the matriarch and the subsequent dispatching of the rest of the small herd as they milled around her. On the other hand, Clovis peoples also took advantage of isolated mammoths and scavenged recently dead mammoth carcasses at sites like Blackwater Draw Locality No. 1. The season when the mammoths were killed is not known for any of the sites. In processing mammoths, Clovis hunters stripped the meat from the bones and left the intact but disarticulated skeletons behind. This pattern can be seen at both types of procurement sites. Clovis points were resharpened and used as butchering tools. This practice resulted in a variability in size and some differences in the final form recovered at the sites. Mammoth bones may also have been made into tools through a process known as quarrying. Bone quarrying workshops are suspected at Lubbock Lake, Duewall-Newberry, and possibly Bonfire Shelter. Collections from man-mammoth sites are housed in different institutions in Texas and elsewhere. The collection from Miami is located at the Texas Memorial Museum and Texas Archeological Research Laboratory of the University of Texas at Austin. Because of the numerous salvage excavations conducted at Blackwater Draw Locality No. 1, collections from this site are located at a number of institutions, including the Texas Memorial Museum and Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, the Museum of Texas Tech University , and Eastern New Mexico University in Portales. Lubbock Lake collections are housed at Texas Tech University, Texas Memorial Museum, and Texas Archeological Research Laboratory. The Bonfire Shelter collection is located at the Texas Memorial Museum and Texas Archeological Research Laboratory. The collection from the Duewall-Newberry site is stored at Texas A&M University and the Witte Museum in San Antonio.

Tsha Handbook → · 3.9 mi away

Colonel O. M. Roberts

1861

1815-1898. President Secession Convention 1861, resulting in comment by Sam Houston, "I don't know what they will do, but Roberts is honest." Raised 11th Texas Infantry. Gallantly led brigade Battle Bayou Bourbeau, La. Chief Justice Texas Supreme Court under Confederacy and state. Federal Reconstruction policy caused his removal from bench 1865, denial U.S. Senate seat 1866. Elected governor by people, 1878 and 1880. A memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy. Erected by the State of Texas 1963.

Historical Marker → · 4.2 mi away

Miami Railroad Depot

1887

When the Southern Kansas Railway Company of Texas built a line through Roberts County in 1887, Miami developed at the end of the track as a campsite for workers. The crew set up a kitchen and a tent hotel. Soon the railroad built a public water well and telegraph lines to nearby Fort Elliott. Passengers and supplies for the post and nearby town of Mobeetie began arriving by rail. This depot was erected in 1888 between North Main and Birge Street. The Santa Fe Railroad bought the line in 1899 and this structure remained in service until 1978. (1979)

Historical Marker → · 4.1 mi away

Miami, TX

1879

Miami, the county seat of Roberts County, is on U.S. Highway 60 between Canadian and Pampa in the southeastern part of the county. It is in the Red Deer Creek valley, backdropped by a mesa called Mount Moriah. Miami supposedly derives its name from an Indian word meaning "sweetheart." The first settler on this site was Marion Armstrong, who in 1879 erected a half-dugout stagecoach stand near Red Deer Creek on the mail route from Mobeetie and Fort Elliott to Las Vegas, New Mexico. The town was platted in 1887 by B. H. Eldridge on the proposed route of the Southern Kansas (later Panhandle and Santa Fe) Railway. Samuel Edge and Mark Huselby purchased several lots and formed the Miami Townsite Company. Supplies for the railroad-construction crews were furnished by daily stages from Mobeetie. By 1888 Miami had 250 inhabitants and three hotels, three grocery stores, two saloons and a cafe, two livery stables, a post office, a mercantile store, a drugstore, and a tin shop. When Roberts County was organized in January 1889, Miami was chosen as county seat. The election, however, was declared fraudulent in December, and Parnell, twenty-five miles northwest, was the legal seat of county government until Miami won another election in November 1898. The present courthouse was built in 1913 to replace an earlier wooden structure. Known as "the last real cowtown in the Panhandle," Miami became a shipping point for area ranches, including the Laurel Leaf , Turkey Track , and Bar CC outfits. The town's newspaper, the Miami Weekly Echo , began in 1894; the name was changed to Miami Chief in 1911. A bank was established in 1907, and the local schools opened in September 1910. Five churches were organized in Miami between 1898 and 1923. By 1915 the town had a population of 700. The first county fair was held there in 1923. Early prospects for oil in the vicinity resulted in the building of the Hillcrest addition in the late 1920s. Grain and cotton production also aided growth. A county library, housed in the courthouse basement, was established in the 1930s. In 1968 a tornado destroyed Miami High School, which was subsequently rebuilt. The town in the 1980s was a retail and shipping point for cattle and grain. In addition, it had some oil-related businesses. Its population was estimated at 656 in 1960, 611 in 1970, and 813 in 1980, when Miami supported twenty-six businesses. The Roberts County Museum, housed in the restored Santa Fe depot, contains, among other things, paleontological artifacts collected by Judge J. A. Mead in the 1930s. Miami holds a National Cow Calling Contest every June in the city park; the contest was begun in 1949 as part of the town's annual Old Settlers' Reunion. Miami, living up to its name, has continued to advertise itself as the "Sweetheart of the Plains." In 1990 it was an incorporated town reporting a population of 675 and thirty-seven businesses. The population dropped to 588 in 2000.

Tsha Handbook → · 3.9 mi away

Roberts County

1876

Roberts County is in the northeastern Panhandle , bounded on the north by Ochiltree County, on the east by Hemphill County, on the south by Gray County, and on the west by Hutchinson County. The center of the county lies at 35° 30' north latitude and 100° 32' west longitude. The county was named for two distinguished Texans with the surname Roberts, John S. Roberts and Oran Milo Roberts . Miami is the county seat. The county is crossed by U.S. Highway 60, State Highway 70, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Roberts County covers 924 square miles of rolling plains with elevations that range from 2,467 to 3,219 feet above sea level. Annual rainfall is 20.7 inches. January's average minimum temperature is 19° F; July's average maximum is 94° F. The county has a growing season of 192 days, the soils are black, sandy loam with clayey subsoils, and between 11 and 20 percent of the land is considered prime farmland. The county is in the Rolling Plains vegetation area, with tall grasses and mesquite and live oak trees and is drained by the Canadian River and its numerous tributaries. Prehistoric cultures occupied this region, followed by Plains Apaches. In the early eighteenth century the Apaches were pushed out by the Comanches, who then dominated the area of the Texas Panhandle until the 1870s. The nomadic Comanches hunted the immense herds of buffalo that ranged through the area that would become Roberts County. The actions of Ranald S. Mackenzie and federal troops in the Red River War of 1874-75 removed the Indian threat. At the same time buffalo hunters killed off the great herds of bison. In 1876 Roberts County was carved from Bexar County and the Clay Land District and attached to Wheeler County for judicial purposes. The first settler was Bill Anderson, who arrived the same year. Henry Whiteside Cresswell established the first ranch on Home Ranch Creek in 1877. Cresswell included most of Roberts County in his Cresswell Ranch and ran 45,000 cattle on land spanning several counties. Marion Armstrong opened a stagecoach stand on Red Deer Creek at the site of future Miami in 1879. There were only thirty-two people in the county in 1880, all of them working on cattle ranches. In 1885 Cresswell moved his ranch headquarters north to Ochiltree County. In 1887 the Southern Kansas Railway built a line from the Oklahoma border into the Panhandle, passing through Roberts County and linking up with Panhandle City the following year. Settlers followed in the wake of the railroad, and the town of Miami was platted out along the railroad in the southeastern part of the county in the summer of 1887. Settlers around Miami petitioned for county government, while cattlemen and settlers along the Canadian River in the northern part of the county framed a counter petition with Parnell, a small settlement in the northwestern part of the county, as proposed county seat. The county was organized in January of 1889, and Miami was chosen as the county seat, but the election was declared fraudulent in December, and Parnell was chosen county seat instead. Parnell remained the county seat until 1898, after another election relocated the seat of county government back to Miami. By 1890 Roberts County had a population of 326 and thirty-four farms and ranches. Among the important ranches were the Cresswell Ranch, the Turkey Track Ranch, and the Cross Bar Ranch. Miami prospered as the shipping point for cattle. The county population slowly grew to 620 in 1900, 950 in 1910, and a peak of 1,469 in 1920. The county economy centered on cattle raising, and the number of cattle increased from 30,259 in 1900 to a peak of 48,959 in 1930. During the same period the county developed a modest farming economy, increasing from 3,576 improved acres in 1900 to 44,751 in 1930. Wheat was by far the most important crop, increasing from 1,423 acres in 1910 to 29,350 acres in 1920, to a peak of 34,102 acres, over three quarters of the cropland harveste

Tsha Handbook → · 3.9 mi away

Things to Do in Miami

historical 22.5 mi away
The Battle of Adobe Walls

In 1874 twenty-eight buffalo hunters held off seven hundred Comanche and Kiowa warriors near Canadian. A young Quanah Parker led the charge but Billy Dixon…
quirky 19.1 mi away
The Panhandle's Secret Fall Colors

Every October Canadian turns into something nobody expects in the Texas Panhandle -- a fall foliage destination. The Canadian River breaks carved cottonwood…
quirky 22.4 mi away
The Pronghorn Highway

The grasslands around Canadian host one of the densest pronghorn antelope populations in Texas. Drive the highways at dawn and you will see hundreds of them…
historical 22.4 mi away
The Fourth of July Rodeo Since 1888

Canadian has held a Fourth of July rodeo every year since 1888 making it one of the oldest continuous rodeos in Texas. Cowboys were roping and riding here…
historical 22.4 mi away
The Last Stop Before No Man's Land

Before barbed wire Canadian was the last supply stop on the Western Trail before cattle herds crossed into Indian Territory. Drovers would stock up on whiskey…
historical 22.5 mi away
The Canadian River Wagon Bridge

When Canadian built its wagon bridge across the river in 1916 it was the longest bridge in Texas at nearly half a mile. Cowboys and cattle had drowned for…
historical 19.2 mi away
Pampa, Texas (c. 1936)
quirky 19.4 mi away
Woody Guthrie Music Fence

A 142-foot-long carbon-steel fence forged in 1992 by welder Rusty Neef spells out the opening notes of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land and the notes are…

Everything Near Miami

80 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Miami on the Map
All music from Texas → · Browse more cities