Stephens County Texas map

The county was created in 1858 from Bosque County and first called Buchanan, after President James Buchanan. In 1861 the legislature renamed it for Alexander Hamilton Stephens, then vice-president of the Confederacy — one of a handful of Texas counties that changed names for political reasons in that year. It was not organised until 1876.

Five counties touch it, an unusually short list: Young north, Palo Pinto east, Eastland south, Shackelford west and Throckmorton at the northwest corner. The county sits on the boundary where North Texas shades into West Texas, in the rough oak-and-mesquite country of the Western Cross Timbers.

Abilene is 56 miles southwest, the nearest city with an airport of any size, and Fort Worth is 88 miles east. Wichita Falls lies 84 miles northeast. No interstate crosses the county; the nearest is I-20, about 30 miles south through Eastland County.

Breckenridge, with 5,173 residents in 2020, is the only incorporated place in Stephens County and holds well over half its people. The town square, the 1926 courthouse and the wide commercial streets around them were all built or rebuilt with oil money in the 1920s, which is why the downtown is larger and more solidly built than a town of this size would otherwise have.

Stephens County Airport lies just outside town and is used for general aviation and, in summer, for sailplane flying — the flat terrain and reliable thermals have made it a regular site for soaring contests. The town also gives its name to a set of murals painted on downtown buildings and to a county museum in the old high school.

Shallow production began near Breckenridge in the mid-1910s, and deeper drilling after the First World War opened a field that ran under the town itself. In 1921 Stephens County was among the leading oil-producing counties in the state. Rigs were crowded onto town lots — one of the best-known photographs of the boom shows a forest of wooden derricks standing right against the courthouse — and Breckenridge's population multiplied many times over within a couple of years, with the usual accompaniment of tent housing, board sidewalks and a strained water supply.

The shallow pools drew down quickly. By the late 1920s the crowd had moved on to newer fields, and the county's population began the long decline that has continued, with pauses, ever since. Oil never stopped entirely: stripper wells producing a few barrels a day still work the pastures, and the county's mineral income remains part of its tax base.

Hubbard Creek Reservoir was built in the early 1960s on Hubbard Creek, a tributary of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, on the north and west sides of Breckenridge. It is owned by the West Central Texas Municipal Water District and supplies a group of towns well beyond this county, Abilene among them, so the water in Stephens County largely leaves it.

The lake accounts for nearly all of the county's 25 square miles of water, and it is the reason a county with under ten thousand residents has boat ramps, marinas and lakeside cabins. It is a shallow reservoir on an unreliable stream, and its level swings widely between wet and dry years — in the drought of the early 2010s it dropped low enough to expose stumps and old creek channels across much of the basin.