Cochran County Texas map
33.61° N · 102.83° W · County seat: Morton · 775 sq mi
Cochran County is where Texas stops. Its straight western boundary is the New Mexico state line, and the counties on the far side of it keep Mountain Time, so a 25-mile drive west out of Morton on SH-114 sets your watch back an hour without leaving the same flat sheet of the Llano Estacado.
Morton sits near the center of the county. The straight line down the left side of the map is the Texas–New Mexico border.
Where Cochran County is
Cochran is in the westernmost tier of Texas counties on the High Plains. Inside Texas it borders Bailey to the north, Lamb to the northeast, Hockley to the east, Terry to the southeast and Yoakum to the south. Across the state line are Roosevelt County, New Mexico, to the northwest and Lea County, New Mexico, to the southwest — both on Mountain Time, both unlinked here because this site maps Texas.
The market town for the county is Lubbock, 56 miles east, reached on SH-114 through Levelland. Farmers on the southern edge trade toward Brownfield in Terry County instead. Nothing else is close: Amarillo is 125 miles northeast and Midland 120 miles southeast.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Morton (county seat) | City | 1,670 |
| Whiteface | Town | 379 |
Those two places hold about 80 percent of the county's people. The rest live on farms and ranch sections laid out on the square-mile survey grid, and the county's 2024 estimate of 2,583 is slightly above its 2020 count — unusual for a rural High Plains county, most of which are still losing residents.
Roads
- SH-114 – the main east–west route, running east from Morton toward Levelland and Lubbock and west across the state line into New Mexico.
- SH-214 – the north–south road through Morton, north toward Muleshoe in Bailey County and south into Yoakum County.
- SH-125 – the southeastern link, connecting Morton with Whiteface and on to the Hockley County oil towns.
There is no interstate and no US highway in Cochran County. Every route in it is a state highway or a farm-to-market road, and the grid of section-line roads between them is the practical map for anyone hauling cotton modules to a gin.
Cotton, water and the Slaughter field
Cochran is a cotton county irrigated from the Ogallala aquifer, and it is far enough west that the aquifer beneath it is thin compared with the counties toward Plainview. That has pushed acreage back toward dryland cotton, grain sorghum and grazing, and it makes the shallow playa lakes scattered across the section grid important — they are where rainfall collects and where some of the recharge back into the Ogallala happens.
Under the eastern side of the county lies part of the Slaughter oil field, one of the large West Texas fields on the Permian Basin's northern shelf, which spreads across the Cochran–Hockley line. Whiteface grew as a service town on that field. Between the pump jacks, the center pivots and the wind turbine rows that have gone up on the plains around it, Cochran County runs on three commodities at once.
The county's founding tracks the same pattern as most of the South Plains: the legislature carved it out of the enormous Bexar District in 1876 and named it for an Alamo defender, but nobody organized a government here until 1924, when the railroad and the plow had finally reached this far west.