Andrews County Texas map
32.31° N · 102.64° W · County seat: Andrews · 1,501 sq mi · Central Time
Andrews County is 1,501 square miles of sand with one town in the middle of it. The western half is shinnery-oak sandhills rolling toward the New Mexico line, the eastern half is flatter caliche plain, and underneath both is the northern shoulder of the Permian Basin — which is why a county with a single incorporated place has 18,610 residents and one of the busiest county road networks in West Texas.
Centered on the city of Andrews at the junction of US-385, SH-176 and SH-115. The straight western boundary is the Texas–New Mexico state line; the pale patches across the county are playa basins and blowout dunes.
Where Andrews County is
Andrews is the northwestern corner county of the core Permian Basin. Gaines County is north, Martin east, Midland off the southeast corner, Ector south and Winkler southwest. The whole western boundary is the New Mexico line, with Lea County, New Mexico beyond it on Mountain Time.
Odessa is 36 miles southeast and Midland 39 miles southeast, close enough that Andrews functions as the third town of that oil-field triangle. Big Spring is 68 miles east and Lubbock 99 miles northeast. At 1,501 square miles the county is larger than the state of Rhode Island, and outside the one town it is close to empty by every measure except wells drilled.
Where people live
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Andrews (county seat) | City | 13,483 |
That is the complete list of incorporated places — the county has exactly one. The remaining 5,127 residents counted in 2020 live outside any city limit, in ranch headquarters, farm houses and oil-field housing spread across 1,500 square miles. The city of Andrews grew up around the townsite chosen for the county seat when the county was organized in 1910, and it now carries the courthouse, the hospital and a school district that draws from every corner of the county.
Roads
- US-385 – the main north–south route through Andrews: south to Odessa and I-20, north to Seminole in Gaines County.
- SH-176 – east–west through Andrews: west to the New Mexico line, east across Martin County toward Big Spring.
- SH-115 – southwest from Andrews toward Kermit in Winkler County.
- No interstate – I-20 is the nearest, reached at Odessa about 36 miles south. Everything else is US highway, state highway or lease road, and the lease roads outnumber the rest many times over.
Sand country, playas and what has been put in it
The surface of western Andrews County is sand — deep aeolian sand held in place by shinnery oak, a knee-high oak that grows in thickets from underground root systems and is the characteristic plant of this landscape. Where the cover breaks, the wind opens blowouts and dunes. It is poor cropland and only fair range, but it is why the county looks the way it does from the air.
Between the dunes are playa basins that hold water after storms. The two largest are Shafter Lake in the north and Baird Lake. Shafter Lake also gave its name to a townsite that competed for the county seat when Andrews County was organized in 1910; it lost, and the town did not survive. The playas are the only surface water here — the census records essentially none.
Oil has been the county's business since the field was opened in the late 1920s, and Andrews has been among the leading crude-producing counties in Texas for most of the time since. In the far west of the county, on the New Mexico line, a licensed low-level radioactive waste disposal facility has operated since 2012 on a site of roughly 14,000 acres, taking material from commercial power plants, universities and medical institutions — placed here specifically for the thick, dry, low-permeability red beds beneath the sand.
The county is named for Richard Andrews, generally recorded as the first Texan soldier killed in the Texas Revolution, at the Battle of Concepción in 1835.