Runnels County Texas map
31.85° N · 99.98° W · County seat: Ballinger · 1,057 sq mi
Runnels County lies on the rolling divide between the Colorado River and the Concho country, halfway between San Angelo and Abilene. It is farming and ranching land — wheat, cotton, cattle — and since the late 2000s it has also been turbine country, with rows of wind machines standing on the ridges above its three small towns.
Ballinger sits in the southeast of the county where US-67 and US-83 meet near the Colorado River. Winters is 18 miles north on US-83; Miles is west on SH-158.
Where Runnels County is
Taylor County is north, Coleman County east, Concho County south, Tom Green County southwest, Coke County west and Nolan County northwest. That places Runnels squarely between two regional centers: San Angelo is 38 miles southwest and Abilene 44 miles northeast, and the county pulls services from both.
Big Spring is 92 miles northwest and Midland 123 miles in the same direction. The nearest interstate is I-20, roughly 45 miles north through Abilene or Sweetwater.
Three towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Ballinger | City (county seat) | 3,625 |
| Winters | City | 2,352 |
| Miles | City | 874 |
Unusually for a county of this size, no single town dominates: the three incorporated cities together hold under 70 percent of the population, and the rest is spread across farm communities such as Rowena, Norton, Wingate, Hatchel and Wilmeth. Rowena and Miles were settled largely by German and Czech Catholic families, and their churches are the tallest buildings for miles.
Roads
- US-67 – the diagonal route from San Angelo northeast through Ballinger to Coleman and Brownwood.
- US-83 – runs north–south the length of the county, linking Winters and Ballinger, then on north to Abilene and south to Eden and Menard. It shares pavement with US-67 through Ballinger.
- SH-158 – heads west from Ballinger through Miles toward Water Valley and Sterling City.
- SH-153 – runs east from Winters into Coleman County.
Turbines on the divide
Runnels sits at the eastern edge of the West Texas wind belt, where the ground rises into low ridges that catch a steady southerly flow. Wind farms have been built across the county since the late 2000s, and turbine rows are now the dominant vertical feature of the landscape either side of US-83 between Winters and Ballinger. The projects arrived with the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone transmission lines, the high-voltage circuits Texas built after 2008 specifically to move West Texas wind power to the cities in the east; without them there would be no economic reason to put turbines here.
For landowners the leases are a second income laid over dryland wheat and grazing, and for the county they are a large share of the tax roll. Service crews working the turbines are a visible part of the workforce in towns that had been losing population for decades.
Ballinger and the Colorado
Ballinger stands where Elm Creek joins the Colorado River, in the southeast corner of the county. The town was laid out in 1886 as a railroad town on the Santa Fe line and named for a Galveston lawyer connected with the railroad; it took the county seat from the older settlement of Runnels City. On the courthouse lawn stands the Charles H. Noyes Memorial, a bronze of a young cowboy on horseback by the sculptor Pompeo Coppini, commissioned by a ranching family after their son was killed in a riding accident.
The county itself was created in 1858 out of Bexar and Travis counties but was not organized with a working government until 1880, once the railroad and the farmers arrived. It is named for Hiram G. Runnels, a Mississippi governor who moved to Texas and served in the state's 1845 constitutional convention.