Lubbock County Texas map

Lubbock County is the center of the South Plains, on the Llano Estacado about 3,200 feet above sea level. Hale County is north, Floyd northeast, Crosby east, Garza southeast, Lynn south, Terry southwest, Hockley west and Lamb northwest.

Amarillo is 111 miles north on I-27, the only interstate on the High Plains between Fort Worth and Albuquerque. Midland is 112 miles southwest, Big Spring 96 miles southeast and Abilene 145 miles southeast. The nearest cities of comparable size are Amarillo and the Midland–Odessa pair, both a hundred-odd miles away; beyond them the next ones are more than 250 miles off, which is why Lubbock's hospitals, university and airport serve a trade area reaching into eastern New Mexico.

Slaton, in the southeast, exists because the Santa Fe put a division point and roundhouse there in 1911, and its brick downtown is arranged around a square facing the depot rather than a courthouse. Wolfforth on the southwest side and Shallowater to the northwest have become commuter towns. Ransom Canyon and Buffalo Springs Lake are the county's two lakeside places, both in the canyon southeast of the city — Buffalo Springs Lake is a small impoundment on the North Fork of the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos and supplies the 5 square miles of water the census credits to the county. Abernathy straddles the Hale County line, with the smaller part here. Read more on the Lubbock city map.

The county road grid outside the city is as regular as a chessboard: farm roads run at one-mile intervals on section lines, so any two points in rural Lubbock County are usually reachable by two straight legs. Inside the city, streets are numbered east–west and avenues run north–south, with the numbering originating at the 1891 townsite near the present courthouse.

Texas Technological College was created by the legislature in 1923 and opened in 1925 on open land west of what was then the edge of Lubbock. It became Texas Tech University in 1969. The campus, the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and its teaching hospital now occupy a continuous block northwest of downtown between US-62/82 and Fourth Street, and the university plus the medical complex are the county's largest employers. Jones AT&T Stadium sits on the north side of campus.

Because the university was placed outside the built-up city, growth filled in around it and then kept going west and southwest — which is why Lubbock's newer neighborhoods, Wolfforth's suburbs and the outer loop are all on that side, while the east side of the city retains the older grid closest to the original railroad frontage.

Water decided it. On a plain with no perennial streams, the canyon of the North Fork of the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos — Yellow House Canyon — had springs, and the first settlements went in near them. Two rival townsites, Old Lubbock north of the canyon and Monterey south of it, competed for the county seat when Lubbock County was organized in 1891. Rather than fight it out, their promoters agreed to merge on a compromise site and moved buildings across the prairie to the new square.

That settled the county seat, but it was the Santa Fe reaching Lubbock in 1909 that made the town the market for the whole South Plains rather than one crossroads among several. Cotton gins, compresses and cottonseed oil mills followed the rails; the county still sits in the middle of the largest contiguous cotton-growing area in the country.

On the evening of 11 May 1970 a tornado rated F5 moved across the northern and central parts of the city, killing 26 people and damaging a large share of the built-up area, including the downtown business district. It twisted the steel frame of the 20-story Great Plains Life Building, which was repaired rather than demolished and still stands.

The damage survey that followed became one of the founding studies of tornado intensity rating, and Texas Tech built a permanent wind engineering research program out of the aftermath — work on debris impact and building envelopes done in Lubbock feeds directly into national storm shelter and wind load standards. For a flat county with no topography to speak of, the weather is the geography.