History of McLean

In 1901 the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Texas Railroad Company dug a water well and built a switch and section house three miles inside Gray County. Around this switch the following year, Alfred Rowe, an English rancher who owned the RO Ranch, laid out a townsite.

The town was named for William P. McLean, a Texas legislator and member of the Texas Railroad Commission. A post office was granted in 1902 with C. C. Cooke as postmaster.

By 1904 McLean had three general stores, a bank, two wagon yards and livery stables, a lumberyard, and a newspaper, the McLean News. A windmill pumped water from a well drilled in the middle of Main Street, and citizens hauled water home in barrels and buckets.

The town was incorporated in 1909 with C. S. Rice serving as its first mayor.

Alfred Rowe, who laid out the McLean townsite, was a passenger aboard the RMS Titanic in April 1912 and was lost when the ship sank. He was returning to his ranch in the Texas Panhandle. His story is a remarkable link between McLean and one of the most famous events of the twentieth century.

McLean quickly became a center for area agriculture. Several hundred carloads of hogs and watermelons were shipped annually, and four telegraph operators were needed to handle the railroad's business.

In 1908 and again in 1919, McLean made unsuccessful bids against Lefors to become the county seat of Gray County. The county seat later moved to Pampa, which became the county's industrial center.

During the 1920s McLean profited from the Panhandle oil boom and became a shipping point for livestock, gas, and oil. Several petroleum-related industries operated in and around the town in the decades that followed.

When U.S. Route 66 was commissioned in 1926, it was routed directly through McLean. Service stations, cafés, motor courts, and garages sprang up to serve travelers. In 1928 the first Phillips 66 station in Texas opened on First Street.

By 1940 McLean had six churches, a newspaper, fifty-nine businesses, and a population of 1,521 — the largest in its history. The town served thousands of Dust Bowl migrants, vacationers, and truckers heading east and west on the Mother Road.

In addition to highway businesses, McLean was home to a garment factory and industries connected to petroleum. In 1970 the town had a hospital, a library, a bank, and fifty businesses.

During World War II, a prisoner of war camp known as Camp McLean was built just east of town. The camp held German prisoners captured during the war, many of them from the North African campaign. Prisoners worked on area farms and ranches, helping to fill labor shortages created by the war.

The camp closed after the war ended. Little remains at the site today, but artifacts and photographs are preserved by the McLean-Alanreed Area Museum, and a Texas historical marker commemorates the camp.

As Interstate 40 was completed across the Texas Panhandle, one Route 66 town after another was bypassed. McLean was the last town in Texas to be bypassed, when the final section of I-40 around the town opened in 1984.

The bypass brought hard times as travelers no longer drove down Main Street. Businesses closed, and the population continued to decline. But residents worked to preserve the town's Route 66 heritage, leading to the restoration of the Phillips 66 station and the opening of the Devil's Rope Museum.

Today McLean welcomes Route 66 enthusiasts from around the world who come to see a piece of authentic Americana. The town remains a close-knit community where neighbors look after one another, the school is the heart of community life, and the history of the Mother Road is proudly preserved.