Parmer County Texas map
34.53° N · 102.79° W · County seat: Farwell · 885 sq mi
Parmer County is a border county without a river: its western edge is the surveyed New Mexico line, and the county seat, Farwell, is built right against it, facing Texico, New Mexico across one street and one hour of clock time. The rest is irrigated High Plains farmland feeding one of the heaviest concentrations of cattle in the country.
The state line runs down the left edge of the frame. US-60, US-70 and US-84 all converge on Farwell before crossing into New Mexico toward Clovis.
Where Parmer County is
Parmer occupies the southwest corner of the Panhandle proper, where the region shades into the South Plains. Deaf Smith County is north, Castro east, Lamb southeast and Bailey south. West is Curry County, New Mexico, which keeps Mountain Time, so a driver leaving Farwell for Clovis loses an hour in the space of a few blocks.
Amarillo is about 72 miles northeast and Lubbock about 85 miles southeast, which leaves Parmer roughly equidistant from the two cities that anchor the High Plains. The surface is flat Llano Estacado tableland at just over 3,900 feet, with playa basins as the only relief and the Ogallala Aquifer under all of it.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Friona | City | 4,169 |
| Bovina | City | 1,690 |
| Farwell | City · county seat | 1,424 |
Friona is more than twice the size of the county seat. Bovina took its name from the cattle that used to block the railroad tracks there in the XIT days.
Roads and rail
- US-60 – the diagonal, entering from Deaf Smith County and running southwest through Friona and Bovina to Farwell, shadowing the railroad the whole way.
- US-84 – southeast toward Muleshoe, Littlefield and Lubbock; northwest into New Mexico at Farwell.
- US-70 – runs with US-84 near the state line, heading for Clovis and Portales.
- SH-86 – east from Bovina toward Dimmitt in Castro County.
- SH-214 – south from Friona toward Muleshoe in Bailey County.
- Loop 403 – the short business loop at Farwell.
The county has no interstate. The Santa Fe main line through Friona, Bovina and Farwell matters more to the local economy than any of the highways: it hauls grain in and cattle and feed out, and every town in the county grew up as a siding on it.
The state line at Farwell
Farwell and Texico are one settlement on two sides of a survey line, sharing a fire response and a main street but not a state, a time zone or a school district. The Texas town takes its name from John V. and Charles B. Farwell, the Chicago brothers behind the syndicate that built the Texas State Capitol in exchange for three million acres of Panhandle land. That land became the XIT Ranch, and Parmer County was one of the ten counties it covered; the ranch's southern divisions were broken up and sold as farms after 1901, which is why the county was not organized until 1907, three decades after it was drawn on the map.
What replaced the ranch is cattle at a different scale. Feedyards ring Friona and Bovina, dairies arrived in numbers after 2000, and the corn, sorghum silage and wheat grown under center pivots here mostly goes into local feed bunks rather than onto a train. The county was one of the last entirely dry counties in Texas before it voted wet.