Collingsworth County Texas map
34.96° N · 100.27° W · County seat: Wellington · 919 sq mi
Collingsworth County carries a spelling mistake as its legal name. It was meant to honour James Collinsworth, the Republic of Texas's first chief justice, but a clerical error in the 1876 bill inserted a g and nobody ever corrected it. The county sits against the Oklahoma line on the Salt Fork of the Red River, with 2,652 people and one town of any size.
Wellington sits near the center of the county on US-83. The Oklahoma state line runs down the eastern edge; the Salt Fork of the Red River crosses the southern half.
Where Collingsworth County is
This is a border county on the eastern edge of the Panhandle. Wheeler County is north, Childress south, Hall southwest, Donley west and Gray touches the northwest corner. Two Oklahoma counties sit across the state line: Beckham off the northeast corner and Harmon off the southeast.
Amarillo is about 90 miles northwest and Wichita Falls about 125 miles southeast. Lubbock is roughly 132 miles southwest. There is no city of 10,000 people within an hour and a half of Wellington in any direction.
The county lies below the Caprock in rolling red-bed country. The Salt Fork of the Red River runs across it from northwest to southeast, joined by the North Fork drainage in the north, and the two river valleys separate the flatter farming ground into blocks. Only about one square mile of the county's surface is water, the lowest share of any county in this batch.
Wellington and Dodson
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Wellington | City, county seat | 1,892 |
| Dodson | Town | 94 |
Wellington holds more than two-thirds of the county's people. Dodson, in the southwest toward the Hall County line, is one of the smallest incorporated towns in the Panhandle. Cotton, wheat, peanuts and cattle are the county's output, and the gins and elevators at Wellington handle it.
Roads
- US-83 – the through route, entering from Shamrock in Wheeler County, running south through Wellington and on to Childress. It is the only US highway in the county and the road that connects it to I-40 about 30 miles north.
- SH-203 – runs east from Wellington toward the Oklahoma state line and west across the Salt Fork toward Hall County.
Everything else is farm-to-market road on the survey grid. There is no interstate, no four-lane divided highway and no scheduled passenger service of any kind in the county.
A dry county until 2017
Collingsworth spent most of a century as one of the entirely dry counties of Texas, where no alcohol could be sold at all. That list had shrunk to about 30 counties statewide by the 2010s, nearly all of them in the Panhandle and West Texas. A local option election in 2017 finally changed the law here, ending one of the longest-running prohibition regimes in the state.
The Salt Fork wreck of 1933
On the night of 10 June 1933, Clyde Barrow drove past a warning at a bridge under construction north of Wellington and the car went off the road into the Salt Fork of the Red River. Bonnie Parker was pinned and badly burned by battery acid and fire; local farmers pulled the pair out before realising who they were, and the gang took a deputy and the county sheriff hostage as they fled. The episode is one of the best-documented incidents in the Barrow gang's Texas travels, and a state historical marker at the site on the river tells the story.
The county was carved out of the Bexar District in 1876, along with the rest of the Panhandle grid, and organized in 1890. It has lost population in most censuses since the 1930s: the farm economy that once supported tenant families across every section now runs on a fraction of the labour, and the county's 2020 count of 2,652 is a small share of what it was when the census peaked here before the Second World War.