Hemphill County Texas map
35.82° N · 100.28° W · County seat: Canadian · 912 sq mi
Hemphill County has one incorporated town in 912 square miles, and everything in the county points at it: Canadian sits where US-60 and US-83 cross the Canadian River, in a valley of cottonwoods and red sandhills that looks nothing like the flat plains 60 miles west. The rest of the county is river breaks and rough pasture, drilled for deep Anadarko Basin gas.
Canadian is in the northwest quarter of the county. The county's east line is the 100th meridian, the Oklahoma border.
Where Hemphill County lies
This is the easternmost tier of the Panhandle: the county's eastern boundary is the 100th meridian, with Ellis County, Oklahoma to the northeast and Roger Mills County, Oklahoma to the southeast. Neither is linked here — they are across the state line. The Texas neighbours are Lipscomb north, Wheeler south, Gray southwest and Roberts west.
Amarillo is 96 miles southwest in a straight line, and Wichita Falls is 166 miles southeast; Oklahoma City is closer to Canadian than Fort Worth is. The Canadian River crosses the county from west to east, and its valley — the "breaks" — drops several hundred feet below the surrounding plain, with sandhills on the north bank. Six of the county's 912 square miles are water. Hemphill is on Central Time and in the 13th congressional district.
Canadian, the only town
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Canadian | City · county seat | 2,325 |
Canadian holds about seven in ten of the county's residents. The remaining thousand or so live on ranches and at unincorporated crossroads such as Glazier and Lake Marvin in the eastern half of the county.
Canadian was laid out in the 1880s where the Southern Kansas railway crossed the river, and it kept its brick main street and a restored downtown theatre. The town's fall foliage festival in October trades on something rare in the Panhandle: hardwood colour, from the cottonwoods and elms in the river bottom.
Roads
- US-60 – southwest to Pampa and Amarillo, northeast across the Oklahoma line toward Arnett; it follows the old rail alignment through Canadian.
- US-83 – the north–south route, up to Perryton and the Oklahoma Panhandle, down to Wheeler and Shamrock on I-40.
- SH-33 – runs east from Canadian toward the Oklahoma line.
US-60 and US-83 share pavement through Canadian and cross the river together on the highway bridge. There is no interstate in the county; the nearest access is I-40 at Shamrock, about 60 road miles south on US-83.
The river, the breaks and the old bridge
Alongside the modern highway crossing at Canadian stands a long steel wagon bridge from 1916, the kind of multi-span trestle built when the Canadian River was a serious obstacle to anything on wheels. It carried traffic for decades, was closed to cars, and has been rebuilt as a walking bridge with a trail at each end — the only place in the county where you can stand over the middle of the river.
The breaks around it are ranch country, and the river bottom is a corridor for deer, turkey and migrating birds; the county has more trees per acre than anywhere else in the northeast Panhandle. Under the surface is the western edge of the Anadarko Basin, where wells reach far deeper than the shallow Panhandle field near Borger, and gas production has funded the county's schools and its unusually well-kept public buildings. The county was created in 1876 from the Bexar district, organized in 1887, and named for John Hemphill, chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court and later a U.S. senator.