Glasscock County Texas map

The county lies on the northern edge of the Edwards Plateau at the eastern side of the Permian Basin, between the oil cities and the Concho Valley. Howard County is north, Sterling east, Reagan south, Upton southwest, Midland west and Martin northwest. Like most of the counties cut out of Tom Green in the 1880s it is a near-square roughly 30 miles on a side.

Big Spring is 27 miles north, Midland 34 miles west, Odessa 50 miles west and San Angelo 70 miles southeast. There is no interstate; I-20 runs across Howard and Martin counties to the north, and residents reach it in about half an hour.

Glasscock County was created in 1887 from Tom Green County and organized in 1893. It carries the name of George Washington Glasscock, a Kentucky-born settler who came to Texas in the Republic period, served in the legislature, and whose mill site on the San Gabriel River became Georgetown — a town he is also the namesake of, several hundred miles east of this county.

The Census Bureau lists no incorporated place in Glasscock County, which makes it one of a small handful of Texas counties with no city, town or village at all. Garden City is an unincorporated community and census-designated place at the junction of US-87 and SH-158, holding the courthouse, Garden City ISD, a bank branch, a grocery and a few dozen houses. St. Lawrence, about 20 miles southwest near the Reagan and Upton lines, is the county's other settlement — a German Catholic farming community founded around its church, with a parish school and a cotton gin.

Because there is no municipal government, county government does everything: roads, law enforcement, emergency services and the tax roll. The 2024 Census estimate has the county at 1,153, slightly above the 2020 count, which is unusual for a rural West Texas county and reflects oilfield employment rather than farm growth.

The surface economy is agriculture. The northern half of the county grows dryland and irrigated cotton on the flat ground running down off the plains; the southern half, where the land breaks toward the Edwards Plateau, is rangeland running cattle and some sheep and goats. Fields are laid out on the section grid and the settlement pattern is one house per square mile or less, which is what makes the population density — a little over one person per square mile — look the way it does.

Underneath, the Spraberry Trend covers most of the county. It has been drilled here since the 1950s, and after 2010 horizontal wells in the Spraberry and Wolfcamp benches raised production sharply. Glasscock County produces far more oil than a county of 1,100 people would suggest, and the mineral tax base pays for a school district and a road network out of proportion to the population. The visible result on the ground is a county of ranch gates and section-line lease roads with pump jacks standing in cotton fields, tank batteries at the fence lines and gas flares at night in a landscape with no town lights to compete with them.

There is no reservoir, no state park and no river of any size. Rainfall averages under 18 inches a year, drainage runs into draws feeding the Colorado River system to the east, and the well water that supports the farms comes from the southern edge of the Ogallala and the Edwards-Trinity aquifers.