Hansford County Texas map
36.27° N · 101.36° W · County seat: Spearman · 921 sq mi
Hansford County is in the top row of Texas, its northern boundary the 36°30′ survey line that separates the state from the Oklahoma Panhandle. There is no interstate and not one U.S. highway in its 921 square miles — every paved through-route is a state highway — and its two towns, Spearman and Gruver, live on irrigated corn, wheat, cattle feeding and the gas wells under the same fields.
Spearman is in the middle of the county on SH-15; Gruver is 12 miles west along the same road. The straight top edge is the Oklahoma state line.
Where Hansford County is
The county is 77 miles northeast of Amarillo in a straight line and roughly two hours by road. Texas County, Oklahoma is across the state line to the north — no Texas county lies in that direction. On the Texas side the neighbours are Ochiltree east, Roberts southeast, Hutchinson south, Moore southwest and Sherman west.
This is High Plains tableland at roughly 3,000 feet, flat enough that the horizon is broken only by grain elevators and centre-pivot sprinklers. Palo Duro Creek runs west to east across the north of the county; the land tilts south toward the breaks of the Canadian River in Hutchinson County. Only about six-tenths of a square mile of the county's surface is water. Hansford is on Central Time and in the 13th congressional district.
Spearman, Gruver and the town that lost the courthouse
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Spearman | City · county seat | 3,160 |
| Gruver | City | 1,133 |
These are the county's only incorporated places; roughly 990 more people live on farms and in unincorporated settlements.
The county takes its name from a settlement called Hansford, which held the courthouse from the county's organization in 1889 but sat away from the railway. When the rail line was built across the county in the early twentieth century, Spearman grew up on it, took the county seat, and Hansford emptied out; the old site is now a scattering of buildings on the prairie. Gruver, the second town, is a grain and feedyard centre with its own school and a set of elevators visible for miles along SH-15.
Roads
- SH-15 – the main east–west route across the top of the Panhandle, running through Gruver and Spearman, east to Perryton and west to Stratford.
- SH-207 – north–south through Spearman, dropping south toward Borger and Panhandle.
- SH-136 – runs southwest out of the county toward Stinnett, Borger and Amarillo.
- SH-51 – serves Gruver and runs south out of the county.
- Loop 84 – the short loop around Spearman.
The nearest interstate is I-40 at Amarillo, about 80 road miles south; the nearest U.S. highway is US-287 at Dumas or US-83 at Perryton. Grain trucks, cattle trucks and oilfield rigs make up most of the traffic on all five routes.
Corn, cattle and the Ogallala
Almost everything in Hansford County depends on water lifted out of the Ogallala Aquifer. Centre-pivot irrigation turned dryland wheat country into corn and silage ground, and the corn feeds cattle in the feedyards that sit along the county roads north and west of Spearman. Grain elevators at Spearman and Gruver load out to rail; the feedyards ship to the packing plants at Cactus in Moore County and to Dumas. Hogs and dairy operations have moved into the same corridor for the same reason — cheap feed grown within a few miles of the barn.
Underneath, the county sits on the northwest flank of the Anadarko Basin, and gas wells and gathering lines share the section roads with the pivots. Population has drifted down as farms have consolidated: the 2024 Census estimate puts the county at about 5,000, a few hundred below the 2020 count. The county was carved out of the Bexar district in 1876 and named for John M. Hansford, a state representative and district judge.