Terrell County Texas map
30.23° N · 102.07° W · County seat: Sanderson · 2,358 sq mi
Terrell County had 760 residents in 2020 across 2,358 square miles — roughly one person for every three square miles, and the seventh-smallest population of any county in Texas. It has no incorporated town at all: Sanderson, the seat, is a census-designated place on US-90.
Sanderson sits near the middle of the county on US-90. The southern boundary is the Rio Grande and the Mexican state of Coahuila.
Where Terrell County is
The county occupies the eastern Trans-Pecos, between the Pecos River country and the Big Bend. It has only four Texas neighbours, because the whole southern boundary is the Rio Grande and the international line with Mexico. Crockett County is northeast, Val Verde County southeast, Brewster County southwest and Pecos County northwest.
Nothing close to a city is nearby. Del Rio is 93 miles southeast in a straight line and Alpine 95 miles west; Marfa is 116 miles west and Odessa 113 miles northwest. All of them are reached over two-lane roads except Odessa. The county was cut out of Pecos County in 1905 and named for Alexander Watkins Terrell, a judge, state legislator and Confederate cavalry officer who later served as U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire.
Sanderson and the other stops
There are no incorporated municipalities in Terrell County, which puts it in a small group of Texas counties with no city government anywhere inside their lines. Sanderson holds the courthouse, the school and the only cluster of businesses, and it is counted by the Census Bureau as a census-designated place rather than a town. Dryden, 25 miles east on US-90 at the State Highway 349 junction, is the other named settlement; the rest of the county is ranch country of creosote flats and limestone draws.
Population figures: 760 at the 2020 census, with a Census Bureau estimate of 718 for 2024.
Roads and the railroad
- US-90 – the county's main street, running east through Dryden toward Langtry and Del Rio, and west toward Marathon and Alpine.
- US-285 – leaves US-90 at Sanderson and runs north across empty country to Fort Stockton and the Pecos valley.
- State Highway 349 – begins at US-90 in Dryden and runs north through Crockett County toward the Permian Basin.
The Southern Pacific built its Sunset Route through here in the early 1880s and Sanderson grew as a division point, with a roundhouse, crews and a payroll that made it the largest settlement for a hundred miles. The line is now Union Pacific track and the trains no longer stop, which is most of the reason the population is a fraction of what it once was. US-90 runs beside the rails for the whole width of the county.
The flood of 1965
On 11 June 1965 a storm over the headwaters of Sanderson Canyon sent a wall of water down the draw and through the town before dawn. Twenty-six people were killed and much of the low ground along the canyon was destroyed. Flood-control dams were built upstream afterwards, and the empty lots along the wash in Sanderson are still where the water went. It is the event the county is best known for locally; nationally it is better known as the setting Cormac McCarthy used for No Country for Old Men, which opens on this stretch of US-90.