Hale County Texas map
34.07° N · 101.82° W · County seat: Plainview · 1,005 sq mi
Hale County has the one thing the rest of the South Plains does not: an interstate. I-27 runs the length of it from south to north, carrying the Lubbock–Amarillo traffic straight through Plainview, a city of 20,169 that is the largest town between the two and the seat of a county that has been one of the most heavily irrigated in Texas since the 1930s.
I-27 runs north–south through the middle of the county. US-70 crosses it at Plainview, heading east to Floydada and west to Olton.
Where Hale County is
Hale is on the Llano Estacado midway between the two big cities of the High Plains. Seven counties border it: Swisher north, Floyd east, Crosby southeast, Lubbock south, Hockley southwest, Lamb west and Castro northwest.
Lubbock is 34 miles south and Amarillo 80 miles north, both on I-27, which makes Plainview a genuine halfway stop rather than a detour. The county is flat enough that the interstate runs nearly arrow-straight across it, and the drive between the two cities is about 120 miles start to finish.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Plainview (county seat) | City | 20,169 |
| Abernathy (part) | City | 2,161 |
| Hale Center | City | 2,058 |
| Petersburg | City | 1,008 |
| Edmonson | Town | 87 |
Abernathy straddles the Lubbock County line; the figure above counts only the Hale County part.
Roads
- I-27 / US-87 – the north–south spine, Lubbock to Amarillo, with Business I-27 running through the older commercial strip in Plainview.
- US-70 – east–west, east to Floydada in Floyd County, west to Olton and on toward Muleshoe.
- SH-194 – the diagonal southeast toward Petersburg and the Crosby County line.
- Loop 369 – the ring route around Plainview.
I-27 is the only stretch of interstate on the entire South Plains, and it exists because the Ports-to-Plains corridor between Lubbock and Amarillo was upgraded to interstate standards; extending the designation north and south of that stretch has been under discussion for years.
Plainview: the university, the beef plant and the point
Wayland Baptist University has been in Plainview since 1908 and is the reason a town this size has a campus, a library and a run of concerts and lectures. Its women's basketball team, the Flying Queens, was one of the dominant programs of the 1950s and put together a winning streak of well over a hundred games — remarkable for a college of a few thousand students, and part of the early history of women's college basketball. Wayland also admitted Black students in 1951, among the first colleges in Texas to do so.
The county's other defining stories are agricultural. Hale sits over a thick section of the Ogallala aquifer and was among the first Texas counties to develop irrigation from it on a large scale, which is why its cotton, corn, grain sorghum and wheat yields ran well above dryland norms for decades and why aquifer decline is a live political question here. That irrigated feed grain supported cattle feedyards, and a large beef packing plant operated in Plainview until it closed in 2013, a shutdown that cost the county roughly 2,000 jobs and shows up in the population line. The county is also inside the Texas High Plains viticultural area, the source of most of the wine grapes grown in the state.
The name Plainview also belongs to archaeology. A bison kill site excavated near the town in the 1940s produced a distinct style of spear point, and Paleo-Indian points of that shape found anywhere in North America are still called Plainview points.