Kent County Texas map
33.19° N · 100.77° W · County seat: Jayton · 903 sq mi
Kent County had 753 people at the 2020 census, the sixth-smallest count in Texas, and it is one of the last three counties in the state that remain entirely dry. Jayton, the seat since 1954, is its only incorporated town; the courthouse it replaced still stands at Clairemont, 10 miles west, in a settlement with almost nobody left in it.
Kent County between Lubbock and Abilene. US-380 runs east–west through Jayton and Clairemont; State Highway 70 crosses it north–south.
Where Kent County is
Kent County sits on the eastern edge of the Caprock escarpment, roughly equidistant from three cities: Lubbock 68 miles northwest, Big Spring 77 miles southwest and Abilene 79 miles southeast. Its neighbours are Dickens north, King at the northeast corner, Stonewall east, Fisher at the southeast corner, Scurry south, Garza west and Crosby at the northwest corner.
The legislature created the county in 1876 out of the Bexar District and named it for Andrew Kent, a settler from Gonzales who rode into the Alamo with the relief party and died there. Organisation waited until 1892.
Jayton, Clairemont and the county seat fight
Clairemont was the seat from the county's organisation, and its stone courthouse of the 1890s sat on a square that never grew much. When the railroad built through Jayton instead, business and population followed the track, and a 1954 vote moved the county government east. Clairemont kept the old building — one of the more photographed abandoned courthouses in Texas — but lost everything else, including its post office.
Jayton had 504 residents in 2020, two-thirds of everybody in the county, and runs the school, the bank and the only grocery. The 2024 estimate for the county is 703, still falling.
Three roads
- US-380 is the main line, crossing the county from Post in Garza County east through Clairemont and Jayton to Aspermont.
- State Highway 70 runs north–south through Jayton, connecting Spur to the north with Sweetwater in Nolan County to the south.
- State Highway 208 leaves the southeast corner toward Snyder in Scurry County.
No interstate comes within 60 miles; the nearest is I-20 at Snyder-Colorado City, about 55 road miles south on SH-208.
The Salt Fork
The Salt Fork of the Brazos River runs diagonally across Kent County, entering from the northwest and leaving toward Stonewall County. Its name is literal: salt springs and salt-bearing beds along the upper Brazos load the water heavily enough that the river has never been usable for irrigation or town supply, which is one reason no reservoir was ever built here and why the county has almost no surface water at all.
The land between the draws is grassland and mesquite, run as large cattle ranches, with dryland cotton on the flatter ground toward Scurry County. Oil production, developed from the 1930s onward, supplies most of the county's tax base — there are far more pumping units in Kent County than people.