Cisco, Texas, Where Hilton Hotels Began

In nineteen nineteen, a young New Mexico businessman named Conrad Hilton came to Cisco intending to buy a bank. He was chasing the oil boom that had erupted two years earlier when the McCleskey Number One well struck oil near Ranger, just a few miles away, turning this stretch of West Texas into a frenzy of derricks and roughnecks. The bank deal fell through.

Walking back from the train station, Hilton noticed men lined up outside a plain two-story brick building called the Mobley Hotel, waiting hours for a room. The owner, Henry Mobley, rented his forty rooms in eight-hour shifts to match the oil-field work rotations. Hilton bought the hotel for forty thousand dollars and never looked back.

That modest Cisco building was the seed of the Hilton Hotels empire, and a historical marker on the site still tells the story.