Crockett County Texas map
30.72° N · 101.40° W · County seat: Ozona · 2,807 sq mi
Crockett County covers 2,807 square miles — larger than Delaware — and contains no incorporated city at all. Ozona is the only town, the county government is the only local government, and the population of 3,098 works out to about one person per square mile.
Ozona sits on I-10 in the northeast quarter of the county. The Pecos River forms the southwestern boundary; everything between is ranch country cut by dry draws.
Where Crockett County is
This is the southwestern corner of the Edwards Plateau, where the tableland is cut by canyons draining toward the Pecos and the Rio Grande. San Angelo lies 77 miles northeast, Odessa 96 miles northwest, Midland 97 miles northwest and Del Rio 98 miles southeast. None of them is close, and there is no town of any size between.
Nine counties touch Crockett, more than almost any county in West Texas. Reagan and Upton lie along the north line, Irion northeast, Schleicher and Sutton east, Terrell and Val Verde south, Pecos west and Crane northwest.
The county was created out of the Bexar District in 1875 and named for David Crockett, the Tennessee congressman turned frontiersman who died at the Alamo. It went unorganized for sixteen years; only in 1891 were there enough residents to elect officers, and Ozona was made the seat that year. A statue of Crockett stands on the town square.
A county with no city
Ozona has never incorporated. It is a census-designated place, not a municipality, so it has no mayor, no city council and no city taxes; the commissioners court, the county sheriff and a water district do the work a city government would do elsewhere. Roughly three-quarters of the county's people live there. Sheffield, in the west near the Pecos, is the only other named settlement of any consequence, and it is smaller by an order of magnitude.
Ozona calls itself "the biggest little town in the world," a phrase that reads differently once you understand it is the sole town in a county the size of a small state. The 2024 census estimate puts the county at 2,799, down from the 3,098 counted in 2020.
Roads
Five numbered routes serve 2,807 square miles: I-10, US-190, SH-137, SH-163 and SH-349. Everything else is a county road or a ranch road behind a gate.
- I-10 – crosses the county east to west with Ozona the only exit town on it. Sonora, the next town east, is about 35 miles away; westbound, the road runs on toward Fort Stockton with nothing in between.
- SH-163 – the north–south spine. North from Ozona it runs to Barnhart and Mertzon in Irion County; south from I-10 it crosses the plateau to Comstock on the Rio Grande.
- SH-137 – leaves I-10 north toward Big Lake in Reagan County.
- SH-349 – runs north out of the county toward Rankin and the Permian Basin.
- US-190 – runs with I-10 across the west of the county before turning off toward Iraan.
The Pecos and Fort Lancaster
The Pecos River forms the southwestern boundary of the county, running in a canyon several hundred feet below the surrounding tableland on its way to the Rio Grande. The country between the canyon rim and I-10 is a maze of draws — Live Oak Creek, Howard Draw, Johnson Draw — that carry no water most of the year and a great deal of it after a plateau thunderstorm.
Where Live Oak Creek approaches the Pecos in the west of the county the army built Fort Lancaster in 1855 to guard the San Antonio–El Paso road at its Pecos crossing. The post was abandoned at the start of the Civil War and never properly re-established. Its stone ruins are now a state historic site reached from I-10 near Sheffield, with a visitor centre and a walking route through the foundations of the barracks and officers' quarters.
Sheep, goats and gas
Crockett County ranked for decades among the leading wool and mohair producers in the United States. The shallow soil over limestone will not grow a crop, but it grows browse, and Angora goats and Rambouillet sheep did well on it; the county's fortunes rose and fell with wool prices and with the federal incentive payments that ended in the mid-1990s, after which many ranches shifted toward cattle, hunting leases and exotic game. Natural gas from wells across the northern part of the county has been the other steady source of county revenue, and it is what pays for schools and roads in a place with almost no property tax base of any other kind.