Dickens County Texas map
33.62° N · 100.79° W · County seat: Dickens · 905 sq mi
The town of Dickens had 213 people in 2020, which makes it one of the smallest county seats in Texas and smaller than Spur, the ranch-and-railroad town 11 miles southwest that holds four times as many residents. The county itself is broken country below the caprock, run on cattle rather than cotton.
Dickens sits where US-82 crosses SH-70. Spur is southwest on SH-70; the Croton and Duck Creek breaks cut the northern and eastern parts of the county.
Where Dickens County is
Dickens lies off the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, in the rolling and eroded country the caprock drains into. Eight counties border it: Motley north, Cottle northeast, King east, Stonewall southeast, Kent south, Garza southwest, Crosby west and Floyd northwest.
Lubbock is 61 miles west on US-82, and that is the drive most residents make for an airport, a hospital specialist or a big-box store. Abilene is 101 miles southeast, Wichita Falls 133 miles northeast. Dickens is in the 13th congressional district, unlike its neighbors on the plains to the west, which are in the 19th.
The two towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Spur | City | 869 |
| Dickens (county seat) | City | 213 |
Between them they hold about 61 percent of the county. Everyone else lives on ranches or in the unincorporated communities scattered along the creeks — a settlement pattern that has barely changed since the county organized in 1891, though the 2024 estimate of 1,725 shows the slow drift downward continuing.
Roads
- US-82 / SH-114 – the east–west pair, west up the caprock to Crosbyton and Lubbock, east toward Guthrie in King County and on to Seymour.
- SH-70 – north–south through the county, crossing US-82 at Dickens, running north toward Matador and south through Spur.
- SH-208 – southeast from Spur toward Clairemont in Kent County and Snyder.
There is no interstate within about 100 miles in any direction. The nearest rail line in service is well outside the county; the track that once served Spur is gone.
Spur, the ranch and the railroad
Spur takes its name from the Espuela Land and Cattle Company, the British-financed outfit that ran the Spur Ranch across this country in the 1880s and 1890s. The Swenson family bought the ranch in 1907, and when the railroad pushed in from the northeast the owners platted a townsite in 1909 and sold lots to farmers on ranch land. That sequence — ranch first, railroad second, town third — is the standard origin story for towns on this side of the caprock, and Spur is one of the clearest examples of it.
The country the ranch used is why Dickens County still looks the way it does. The Croton Breaks in the north and the Duck Creek and Salt Fork drainages elsewhere cut the county into mesas, red dirt slopes and brush, ground that will carry cattle but will not take a plow. Farming here is concentrated on the flatter tables in the west and southwest, where the county touches the caprock proper and irrigation from the Ogallala is at least possible.
Spur made national news in 2014 when the city declared itself open to tiny houses, dropping the minimum dwelling size that most Texas towns enforce in an attempt to attract residents to cheap lots. The county and its seat both carry the name of a man recorded among the Alamo dead in 1836, one of a string of South Plains counties the legislature named for Alamo and San Jacinto casualties in a single 1876 act.