Gray County Texas map
35.40° N · 100.81° W · County seat: Pampa · 929 sq mi
Gray County sits over the eastern end of the Panhandle oil and gas field, the discovery that turned Pampa from a Santa Fe railroad stop into a town of nearly 17,000 people with gas plants and a chemical works on its edges. It is also one of the few counties in the northeastern Panhandle that an interstate reaches: I-40 runs across the far south of the county through McLean and Alanreed.
Pampa sits in the north half of the county on US-60. The straight line across the bottom of the map is I-40, the old Route 66 corridor.
Where Gray County is
Gray is in the eastern Panhandle, 59 miles northeast of Amarillo in a straight line and about 120 miles from the Oklahoma line at its nearest point in either direction. Seven counties touch it: Roberts to the north, Hemphill to the northeast, Wheeler to the east, Collingsworth to the southeast, Donley to the south, Armstrong to the southwest and Carson to the west.
Like most of the Panhandle grid, the county is close to square and close to 30 miles on a side. The northwest half is level High Plains farmland; the southeast breaks up along the tributaries of the North Fork of the Red River, which is why the towns of Lefors and McLean sit in rougher country than Pampa does. The whole county is on Central Time and in the 13th congressional district.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Pampa | City · county seat | 16,870 |
| McLean | Town | 660 |
| Lefors | Town | 421 |
The three incorporated towns hold about 17,950 of the county's 21,227 residents; the rest live on farms, ranches and gas leases. Pampa is the centre of its own micropolitan statistical area, which covers the whole county.
Roads and the old Route 66
- I-40 – crosses the south of the county past Alanreed and McLean; west to Amarillo, east to Shamrock and Oklahoma.
- US-60 – the Pampa road, running southwest to White Deer and Amarillo and northeast to Canadian, roughly along the railway.
- SH-70 – north from Pampa toward Perryton, south to Clarendon and US-287.
- SH-152 – west from Pampa to Borger and Dumas, east toward Mobeetie and Wheeler.
- SH-273 – the local link between Pampa and Lefors in the south of the county.
- Loop 171 – Pampa's bypass; Loop 271 carries the old highway through McLean.
McLean's main street is a surviving stretch of the pre-interstate US-66 alignment, and the town keeps a barbed wire museum in an old brassiere factory on that street. Alanreed, a few miles west, was a stop on the same road.
The Panhandle field
The Panhandle field — gas first, then oil — was proved out across Gray, Carson and Hutchinson counties in the early 1920s, and it made Gray County one of the wealthiest rural counties in the state for a generation. Pampa filled with drilling crews, and the gas that came up with the oil fed carbon black plants and, later, a large chemical plant east of town on SH-152. Lefors and the LeFors field sat at the southern edge of the same play. Pumping units and gathering lines still stand in wheat fields across the county, and the courthouse square in Pampa dates from that money.
Woody Guthrie spent his late teens and early twenties in Pampa during the Dust Bowl years and started writing songs there before leaving for California; a small music centre in town keeps the connection. The county itself is named for Peter W. Gray, a Houston lawyer and legislator, and was cut out of the enormous Bexar district in 1876 along with most of the Panhandle, though nobody organized a government here until 1902.