Erath County Texas map
32.24° N · 98.22° W · County seat: Stephenville · 1,090 sq mi · Central Time
Erath County is Texas dairy country. The Bosque and Paluxy headwaters cut through a landscape of open pasture and peanut ground southwest of Fort Worth, and for decades this county has milked more cows than any other in the state. Its seat, Stephenville, holds Tarleton State University and calls itself the Cowboy Capital of the World.
Stephenville sits at the center where US-377, US-281 and SH-108 meet. I-20 clips the county's northern edge; Dublin is southwest on US-377.
Where Erath County is
The county was formed in 1856 from parts of Bosque and Coryell counties and named for George Bernard Erath, an Austrian-born surveyor who fought at San Jacinto and laid out much of central Texas.
Seven counties surround it: Palo Pinto on the north, Hood on the northeast, Somervell on the east, Bosque on the southeast, Hamilton on the south, Comanche on the southwest and Eastland on the west. It is a transitional county — counted with North Texas, but with the Cross Timbers giving way to the limestone rim of the Hill Country to the south and the drier country of West Texas beginning past Eastland. Fort Worth is roughly 63 miles northeast of Stephenville by US-377, and Waco is about 79 miles southeast.
Cities
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Stephenville | City · county seat | 20,963 |
| Dublin | City | 3,365 |
Those two are the only incorporated places. Nearly half the county's population lives outside any city limit, on farms and along the FM roads.
Roads
- US-377 – the county's main artery, running northeast to Granbury and Fort Worth and southwest through Dublin toward Brownwood.
- US-281 – enters from Hamilton in the south, meets US-377 at Stephenville and continues north toward Mineral Wells.
- US-67 – overlaps US-377 through Stephenville, then splits southeast toward Glen Rose and Cleburne.
- SH-6 – runs west out of Stephenville toward Gorman and Eastland County.
- SH-108 – north from Stephenville through Morgan Mill toward Gordon and I-20.
- I-20 – crosses only the far northern corner of the county between Ranger and Gordon, about 25 miles from Stephenville.
Dairies and the Bosque
The North Bosque River rises in the northwest of the county and runs southeast past Stephenville toward Lake Waco. The bottomland along it, and along the Paluxy and Leon river headwaters, carries the dairy operations that made this county's reputation: hundreds of herds concentrated in a small area, most of them within 20 miles of Stephenville. That concentration is also why the North Bosque has been the subject of long-running work on nutrient runoff and water quality — the county's own agricultural research station studies it.
Around the dairies, the sandy soils of the western Cross Timbers grow peanuts, pecans and hay, and the rougher ground on the north end runs beef cattle and goats. Only about seven square miles of the county is water, the lowest share of any county in this part of Texas; there is no major reservoir here, and the rivers stay small.
Tarleton State and Dublin
Tarleton State University sits on the south side of Stephenville and is part of the Texas A&M University System. It began as a private college in the 1890s, joined the A&M system in the 1910s, and its enrollment now exceeds the rest of the county seat's population — which is why Stephenville has a stadium, a rodeo program and a nightlife out of scale with a town of 21,000.
Dublin, 12 miles southwest on US-377, held the oldest Dr Pepper bottling plant in the country. The Dublin plant opened in 1891 and kept using pure cane sugar long after the rest of the industry switched to corn syrup, which made its bottles a collector's item until a 2012 legal settlement ended the arrangement. The plant building still operates as a museum and soda fountain on the town square.