Childress County Texas map
34.53° N · 100.21° W · County seat: Childress · 714 sq mi
Childress County sits off the Caprock in the Rolling Plains at the southeastern corner of the Panhandle, and the town of Childress is the crossroads: US-287 between Fort Worth and Amarillo meets US-83 running north to Kansas and south to the Rio Grande. It is the smallest county in this corner of the state at 714 square miles, but it has more water in it than any of its neighbours.
Childress sits south of the county's center on US-287. The Oklahoma state line runs along the northeast corner, following the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.
Where Childress County is
Childress has only four Texas neighbours: Collingsworth north, Hardeman east, Cottle south and Hall west. Its fifth neighbour is Harmon County, Oklahoma, off the northeast corner across the Red River.
Wichita Falls is about 107 miles southeast on US-287 and Amarillo about 104 miles northwest on the same road, which puts Childress almost exactly halfway between them — the reason the town has more motels, truck stops and restaurants than a county of 6,664 people would otherwise support. Lubbock is roughly 115 miles southwest.
Unlike its neighbours to the west, Childress County is entirely below the Caprock Escarpment. The land is rolling red-bed country broken by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River and by Baylor and Groesbeck creeks, and it is mesquite and grass rather than the level cropland of the Llano Estacado.
Towns in the county
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Childress | City, county seat | 5,735 |
Childress is the only incorporated place, and it holds 86 percent of the county's population — one of the highest concentrations in a single town anywhere in rural Texas. The rest of the county is ranch and farm land with a handful of crossroads settlements.
Roads and rails
- US-287 – four lanes northwest to Memphis, Clarendon and Amarillo, southeast to Vernon and Fort Worth. It runs through the middle of Childress and carries heavy truck traffic day and night.
- US-83 – the north–south route, joining US-287 through town, running north to Wellington in Collingsworth County and south to Paducah in Cottle County.
- US-62 – enters from the northeast out of Oklahoma and merges into the US-287 corridor at Childress.
- SH-256 – runs west from Childress toward Memphis in Hall County, a shortcut across the rangeland north of US-287.
A division-point town
Childress exists because of the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, which built through in 1887 and made the new townsite a division point — the place where crews changed and locomotives were serviced. The shops and yards gave the town a payroll that farming alone could not, and for decades the railroad was the largest employer in the county. The line still runs through, now part of the BNSF network, and the highway corridor beside it follows the same logic.
The county has stayed a service centre ever since. TxDOT runs one of its 25 statewide districts out of Childress, covering the counties around it. During the Second World War the Army Air Forces operated a bombardier training school at an airfield south of town, one of a string of Panhandle training bases built for the flat weather and empty airspace. The regional hospital and the state prison unit in the county add to the same pattern: a small town doing institutional work for a wide, thinly populated area.
Water is the other distinction. Childress County counts 17 square miles of water — 2.4 percent of its area, several times the share of any neighbouring county — held in the river channels and in Baylor Lake, the reservoir northwest of town on Baylor Creek that supplies the city. The county was created out of the Bexar District in 1876 and organized in 1887, and it is named for George Campbell Childress, principal author of the Texas Declaration of Independence.