World's Largest Branding Iron

Vega's Milburn-Price Culture Museum sits half a block off Route 66, and on its grounds is an iron the museum calls the world's largest branding iron. The museum announced in July 2018 that it had placed a 22-foot-long, 3,000-pound iron carrying the XIT Ranch brand, made by Greg Conn, who is now the museum's director. In June 2026 he told KVII: “The brand weighs 3,000 pounds, 22 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 5 feet tall.”

The iron belongs to the museum's XIT display. The museum said in 2018 that it would “help us tell the XIT story and our connection to the Texas State Capitol building.” The connection, per Route 66 News, is land: the Texas Legislature appropriated in 1879 the land that became the ranch to help finance the Capitol. The XIT operated in the Texas Panhandle, including around Vega, from 1885 to 1912, covering about three million acres along roughly 200 miles of the New Mexico border and running 150,000 head of cattle at its peak. It struggled to make a profit, its owners sold parcels to pay off bondholders, and the last XIT cattle were sold in 1912.