Shamrock, Texas, A Lucky Name on the Edge of the Panhandle

The name Shamrock belongs to this Texas Panhandle town by way of an Irish sheep rancher who wanted a little luck.

In eighteen ninety, a man named George Nickel applied to the United States Postal Service to open a post office at his dugout home, six miles north of where the town stands today. He was an Irish immigrant, and his mother had always told him to depend on a shamrock for courage and good fortune. He suggested the name for the post office. Federal officials accepted it. Then Nickel's home burned to the ground that same year, and the post office never opened. The name, however, survived him and his bad luck.

When the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway pushed through Wheeler County in the summer of nineteen oh two, it established a depot at a site south of where Nickel had lived. The town that grew around that depot inherited the shamrock name. It was incorporated in nineteen eleven. By nineteen twenty-five the population had reached twenty-five hundred, driven first by ranching, then by oil discovered in the surrounding region.

Route Sixty-Six arrived in the late nineteen twenties, and Shamrock became the first notable stop in Texas for travelers heading west from Oklahoma. Being first had commercial advantages. A cluster of gas stations, cafes, and motor courts appeared along the highway to catch drivers who had been on the road since Amarillo or Oklahoma City and needed to stop.

Among those establishments, one became nationally famous. The U-Drop Inn opened in nineteen thirty-six, a gas station and cafe complex so architecturally extraordinary that it has outlasted every other business on that stretch of the old highway. Shamrock today holds about eighteen hundred people, a fraction of its peak, but the buildings that Route Sixty-Six built remain, and the town still turns a little green on Saint Patrick's Day.