Scurry County Texas map

The county was created out of the Bexar District in 1876 and organized in 1884, named for William Read Scurry, a Texas legislator and Confederate general. It is a near-square block of 907 square miles between the Caprock Escarpment and the Colorado River breaks.

Clockwise from north, its neighbors are Kent, Fisher to the east, Nolan southeast, Mitchell south, Borden west and Garza northwest. Big Spring is 47 miles southwest, Abilene 72 miles southeast, Lubbock 79 miles northwest and Midland 85 miles southwest. No interstate touches the county; I-20 runs 25 to 30 miles south of the line through Colorado City and Sweetwater.

Snyder is the only incorporated place in Scurry County, and it holds two-thirds of the population. The remaining 5,500 people live on farms and ranches and in the unincorporated communities of Hermleigh, Ira, Fluvanna and Dunn, each of which keeps its own school or school district identity.

In November 1948 a well northwest of Snyder found the Canyon Reef, a Pennsylvanian limestone reef trend that became the Kelly-Snyder field. Drilling rigs arrived by the hundreds, Snyder's population jumped from roughly 3,800 to over 12,000 inside two years, and the county built a new courthouse and schools on the proceeds.

The operators of the field organized as the Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operators Committee — SACROC — to manage pressure across the whole reservoir instead of well by well. In the early 1970s SACROC began injecting carbon dioxide to push out oil left behind by ordinary pumping, one of the first large-scale CO₂ floods anywhere, and it is still one of the longest-running. Scurry County has stayed a steady oil producer ever since without ever repeating the frenzy of 1948.

Snyder grew from a trading post set up in the 1870s for buffalo hunters working the Rolling Plains. In 1876 the hunter J. Wright Mooar killed a rare white bison near the site, and a statue of a white buffalo has stood on the courthouse square ever since — replaced more than once after weather and pranksters took their turns at it.

Oil money also gave Snyder an art museum: the Diamond M Foundation, funded by the McLaughlin family of the Diamond M Ranch, displayed a collection of Western and American paintings and bronzes in a purpose-built gallery in town for decades. Western Texas College, a two-year public college with a campus on the south side of Snyder, opened in 1971 and is the county's other constant employer alongside the oilfield and the schools. Scurry County was one of the last entirely dry counties in Texas: beer and wine sales in Snyder were approved only in 2006, and liquor by the drink countywide in 2008.

Lake J. B. Thomas, on the Colorado River at the southwest corner of the county, has held water since 1952. Filled to its spillway at an elevation of 2,258 feet it covers about 7,282 acres, though in drought years it drops far below that. The Colorado River Municipal Water District built it to supply Snyder, Big Spring and Odessa, and it remains the only significant open water in the county.