Deaf Smith County Texas map

Deaf Smith is a border county on the western edge of the Panhandle. Oldham County is north, Potter northeast, Randall east, Castro southeast and Parmer south. Across the state line to the west are Quay and Curry counties, New Mexico — both on Mountain Time, an hour behind Hereford.

Amarillo is about 48 miles northeast, and Hereford sits within its trade area without being part of its metro: the Census treats Deaf Smith County on its own as the Hereford micropolitan statistical area. Lubbock is roughly 104 miles southeast.

At 1,499 square miles this is one of the larger Panhandle counties, half again the size of the standard 900-square-mile grid squares to the east. The surface is Llano Estacado — flat, high and almost waterless, with playa basins standing in for creeks. Tierra Blanca Creek, the drainage that eventually becomes the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River in Palo Duro Canyon, heads in this county and runs east past Hereford.

Hereford is the only incorporated place in the county and holds four of every five residents. It is by a wide margin the largest town of any county in this batch, and the only one with a hospital, a daily newspaper and a commercial trade area of its own. The county's population is majority Hispanic, a pattern set by decades of packing-plant and feedyard work.

Those two are the county's only US highways, and they cross in Hereford. No interstate touches Deaf Smith County — I-40 runs about 25 miles north through Oldham and Potter counties. The county's long boundary with New Mexico has no US highway crossing at all; drivers heading west leave through Parmer County at Farwell or through Oldham County on I-40.

The town took the name of the Hereford breed of cattle when it was laid out in the early 1900s, and the county's later history made the name look prophetic. Once irrigation from the Ogallala aquifer turned this ground into corn and silage country after the Second World War, the feed was here, the grass country was next door and the railroad ran through the middle. Commercial feedyards followed, then packing capacity, and the concentration of cattle on feed in and around Deaf Smith County became one of the highest in North America. Grain trucks, cattle trucks and the smell of the yards are the daily texture of the place.

Hereford has a second, odder claim: its groundwater is naturally high in fluoride, and mid-century dental surveys found local children had strikingly few cavities. The town was widely written up as "the town without a toothache," and the finding fed into the national argument for adding fluoride to municipal water elsewhere.

In the mid-1980s the county came close to a very different future. The U.S. Department of Energy shortlisted a salt formation beneath Deaf Smith County as one of three finalist sites for the country's first permanent high-level nuclear waste repository. Local farmers and ranchers organised hard against it, arguing the risk to the aquifer, and the plan ended when Congress redirected the programme to Yucca Mountain in Nevada in 1987.

The county's name comes from Erastus Smith, the scout of the Texas Revolution who was partially deaf and known to everyone as "Deaf" Smith — pronounced deef, and still said that way here.