Garza County Texas map
33.18° N · 101.30° W · County seat: Post · 896 sq mi
Post is a company town built by a breakfast-cereal manufacturer. C.W. Post, who made Postum and Post Toasties, bought roughly a quarter-million acres of ranch land here in 1906, laid out a planned colony called Post City the following year, and then spent several summers trying to make it rain by detonating dynamite along the rim of the Caprock Escarpment. The town is still the only incorporated place in Garza County.
Post sits just below the Caprock Escarpment where US-84 climbs onto the Llano Estacado. Lake Alan Henry is in the county's southeastern corner.
Where Garza County is
Garza is southeast of Lubbock, straddling the Caprock Escarpment, which is why the geographers file it with the canyonlands at the edge of the Llano Estacado rather than with the flat farm counties. Seven counties border it: Crosby north, Dickens northeast, Kent east, Scurry southeast, Borden south, Lynn west and Lubbock northwest.
Lubbock is 42 miles northwest on US-84 — close enough that the highway between them is the county's lifeline. Big Spring is 65 miles southwest, Abilene 104 miles southeast.
One town
Post had 4,796 residents in 2020, about 82 percent of the county total, and it is the only incorporated municipality in Garza County. Everything else on the map — Justiceburg on US-84 southeast of town, Close City, Graham — is an unincorporated crossroads. The 2024 census estimate drops the county to 4,645, a sharp change over four years for a county this size.
Post City was platted on a grid with a hotel, a gin, a textile mill and rows of planted trees, and lots were sold to farmers on terms rather than auctioned. That planning shows in the street layout today. The county's name is older and comes from somewhere else entirely: José Antonio de la Garza, an early San Antonio settler and merchant, from the Bexar District out of which this county and most of its neighbors were cut in 1876.
Roads
- US-84 – the main diagonal, northwest to Lubbock and southeast to Snyder; it climbs the caprock just outside Post.
- US-380 – east–west through Post, west into Lynn County toward Tahoka, east toward Jayton.
- SH-207 – north from Post to Crosbyton and Floydada.
Lake Alan Henry
In the southeastern corner of the county, the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River is dammed to form Lake Alan Henry, impounded behind the John T. Montford Dam and finished in the early 1990s. It belongs to the city of Lubbock, which built it as a long-term water supply and only completed the pipeline to bring the water into town years later. It is not a South Plains-style reservoir: it lies in a red-rock canyon below the caprock, with steep sides, clear water and a reputation among anglers for largemouth bass rather than the muddy shallows of a playa-fed lake.
The lake is the reason Garza County has any recreation economy at all, and it is the visible half of the county's split personality. Above the escarpment the northwestern corner is flat cotton land farmed off the Ogallala aquifer. Below it, the eastern two-thirds is broken canyon country grazed by cattle and drilled for oil — Garza has produced from shallow Permian-age fields since the 1920s, and pump jacks are as much a part of the view from US-84 as mesquite. C.W. Post's rainmakers never proved anything, but the land they were trying to water is still doing the same two jobs.