The White Deer Land Company was the successor to the Francklyn Land and Cattle Company, an English syndicate chartered in 1881 to invest in ranching in the American West. At its heyday, the syndicate controlled more than 700,000 acres of ranch land in the Panhandle. The company was bankrupted by the January blizzard of 1886 and reorganized as the White Deer Land Company (named for White Deer Creek). Initially headquartered in a log building near White Deer Creek, the company moved to Pampa in 1891, building two offices (not extant), and in 1916 commissioned this unusual building, the only known project jointly attributed to Amarillo architects William Raymond Kaufman and Joseph Champ Berry. Designed to hold both offices and living quarters, including a guest suite for visiting English investors, the two-story headquarters building’s most distinctive features are the bay windows on the second floor. The red brick building is boldly banded with prominent white stone belt courses and cornices.
Two blocks south, at 320 S. Cuyler, the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center occupies the former drugstore, a one-story brick building, where the musician worked for seven years after he moved here in 1929 from Oklahoma (he left Pampa in 1937).