Lamb County Texas map
34.07° N · 102.35° W · County seat: Littlefield · 1,018 sq mi · Central Time
Every town in Lamb County stands on ground that was once fenced inside the XIT Ranch. The county's southwest quarter was the XIT's Yellow House division, and when George W. Littlefield bought that block in 1901 and the railroad came through eleven years later, the town that took his name was platted on it. Six small farm towns and a heavily irrigated cotton and grain sorghum landscape are what grew out of the breakup.
Centered on Littlefield. The pale circles scattered across the county on satellite imagery are center-pivot irrigation fields drawing on the Ogallala aquifer.
Where Lamb County is
Lamb is on the northern edge of the South Plains, one county in from the New Mexico line. Castro County is north, Hale east, Lubbock off the southeast corner, Hockley south, Cochran at the southwest corner, Bailey west and Parmer northwest.
Lubbock is 44 miles southeast and Amarillo 85 miles northeast, which puts Lamb County almost exactly between the two on the US-84 diagonal. The land is flat table-top plain broken only by playa basins; the county's 1.5 square miles of water are those playas, not a river.
Towns of Lamb County
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Littlefield (county seat) | City | 5,949 |
| Olton | City | 1,984 |
| Sudan | City | 948 |
| Earth | City | 905 |
| Amherst | City | 669 |
| Springlake | Town | 143 |
Earth, in the northwest of the county, is the only incorporated place in the United States with that name. Springlake sits a few miles north of it on US-385. Olton, in the northeast, is the county's second town and the market point for the grain and cotton grown between Lamb and Hale counties. Littlefield's best-known native is Waylon Jennings, born there in 1937.
Roads
- US-84 – the diagonal: southeast to Lubbock, northwest through Sudan toward Muleshoe and Clovis, New Mexico.
- US-70 – runs with US-84 between Sudan and Littlefield, then breaks east through Olton toward Plainview.
- US-385 – north–south through Littlefield, Earth and Springlake; north to Dimmitt and Hereford, south to Levelland.
- Loop 385 – the business route around Littlefield.
- Loop 430 – short state loop serving Olton.
The XIT and the Yellow House
The XIT Ranch was the payment for building the Texas State Capitol: the state traded roughly three million acres along the New Mexico line to a syndicate that put up the money for the building. The ranch was worked in divisions, and the Yellow House division — named for the yellowish bluffs at Yellow House Draw — covered Lamb County and part of Hockley. It was never good long-term ranch economics, and the XIT sold off blocks steadily from the 1890s.
George Washington Littlefield, an Austin banker and cattleman, bought the Yellow House block in 1901. When the Santa Fe built its line across the pasture in 1912 he laid out a townsite beside the tracks, and Littlefield has been the county seat ever since the county government moved there from Olton. The section-and-block survey lines the XIT ran across this country are still the property lines and the road grid you see on the map today.
Lamb County was one of the squares created in 1876 out of the old Bexar District, but it was not organized until 1908. It is named for George A. Lamb, a lieutenant killed at the Battle of San Jacinto.