Hopkins County Texas map
33.15° N · 95.57° W · County seat: Sulphur Springs · 792 sq mi
Hopkins County was long called the dairy capital of Texas, and the milk barns and pastures on either side of Interstate 30 are still what the county looks like from the road. Sulphur Springs, its only sizeable town, sits at the midpoint of the drive from Dallas to Texarkana.
Centered on Hopkins County. The pin marks Sulphur Springs on I-30; Cooper Lake reaches into the county's northwest corner.
Where Hopkins County is
The county sits about 75 road miles east of Dallas on I-30, in the transition country where the Blackland Prairie runs out into the post oak and pine of East Texas. The North Sulphur and South Sulphur rivers drain the northern half; White Oak Creek and the headwaters of the Sabine drain the south.
Its neighbors are Delta County north, Franklin County east, Wood County south, Rains County southwest and Hunt County west. Hopkins is one of the 1846 counties, created at statehood out of parts of Lamar and Nacogdoches counties and named for the family of David Hopkins, an early settler.
Paris is 35 miles north and Tyler 57 miles southeast; McKinney is 62 miles west. Of 792 square miles, 25 are water. Central Time; 4th congressional district.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Sulphur Springs (county seat) | City | 15,946 |
| Como | Town | 724 |
| Cumby | City | 681 |
| Tira | Town | 319 |
Nearly half the county's population lives in Sulphur Springs, and most of the rest lives on farms and in unincorporated communities — Pickton, Saltillo, Brashear, Sulphur Bluff, Birthright — scattered along the farm-to-market roads.
Roads
- Interstate 30 – crosses the county east–west through Cumby and Sulphur Springs, entering from Hunt County and leaving toward Mount Vernon. Dallas is west, Texarkana and Little Rock east.
- U.S. 67 – the older road the interstate replaced, still signed with it across the county.
- Loop 301 – the belt route around Sulphur Springs, connecting the interstate exits to the north and south sides of town.
- SH-19 – the main north–south route, from Cooper in Delta County down through Sulphur Springs to Emory in Rains County.
- SH-11 – runs west from Sulphur Springs through Cumby to Commerce, and east toward Pickton and Winnsboro.
- SH-154 – southeast from Sulphur Springs toward Quitman in Wood County.
Dairy country
Hopkins County built its economy on milk in the middle of the twentieth century, when small Grade A dairies covered the improved pastures on both sides of the county. At its peak it had more dairy farms than any other county in Texas. Consolidation thinned the herds sharply in the 1990s, and many of the surviving operations run beef cattle or hay instead — but dairying is still the county's signature, and the Southwest Dairy Museum in Sulphur Springs keeps the equipment and the record of it.
The other local export is Hopkins County stew, a chicken-and-vegetable stew cooked in iron pots over wood fires, which has its own county cook-off every fall.
Cooper Lake and the square
Cooper Lake, formally Jim Chapman Lake, was impounded on the South Sulphur River in the early 1990s and lies across the Hopkins–Delta county line. Cooper Lake State Park is split into two separated units, and the South Sulphur Unit — the larger one, with the campgrounds, equestrian trails and swim beach — is on the Hopkins County shore northwest of Sulphur Springs. Closer to town, Lake Sulphur Springs supplies the city's water.
The 1895 Hopkins County courthouse, a red-sandstone Romanesque building with a tall central tower, stands on a square that the city rebuilt as Celebration Plaza — including a pair of freestanding public restrooms with mirrored-glass walls, an oddity that turns up on lists of strange Texas landmarks.