Wichita County Texas map
33.99° N · 98.71° W · County seat: Wichita Falls · 633 sq mi · Central Time
Wichita County packs 129,350 people into 633 square miles — a small county by Texas standards, and about four fifths of its population lives in Wichita Falls. Its northern boundary is the Red River and the Oklahoma state line, and the jet training base on the city's north side is the largest single employer for a hundred miles in any direction.
Wichita Falls sits in the southeast quarter with Sheppard Air Force Base immediately north of it. Burkburnett is on the Red River at the top, Iowa Park to the west and Electra in the far western corner.
Where Wichita County is
The county was created in 1858 from Cooke County and organized in 1882, once the Fort Worth and Denver railway reached the site of Wichita Falls. It is named for the Wichita people, whose villages stood along this river system, and the river and the falls on it gave the county seat its name.
The Red River makes the whole northern boundary, so Tillman County, Oklahoma lies north and Cotton County, Oklahoma northeast; neither is in Texas and neither has a page here. On the Texas side the neighbours are Clay County east, Archer County south, Baylor County southwest and Wilbarger County west.
Wichita and Archer counties together make the Wichita Falls metropolitan statistical area. Fort Worth is 116 miles southeast down US-287, Denton 105 miles southeast and Abilene 122 miles southwest. Lawton, Oklahoma is about 50 miles north on I-44, and Oklahoma City about 140 miles beyond it — a route that makes Wichita Falls a stopping point rather than a destination for a lot of its traffic.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Wichita Falls (part) | City · county seat | 102,284 |
| Burkburnett | City | 10,938 |
| Iowa Park | City | 6,533 |
| Electra | City | 2,292 |
| Pleasant Valley | Town | 359 |
| Cashion Community | City | 286 |
Wichita Falls has annexed south past the county line into Archer County, so the figure above counts only the Wichita County part. The four incorporated places outside the seat hold about 20,000 people between them, and almost the whole county lives in one of the six.
Roads across the county
- I-44 – begins at Wichita Falls and runs north through Burkburnett across the Red River to Lawton and Oklahoma City. Its Texas mileage is short and lies entirely in this county.
- US-287 – the freeway through Wichita Falls, southeast toward Bowie and Fort Worth, northwest toward Vernon and Amarillo.
- US-82 and US-277 – run together west through Iowa Park and Electra toward Vernon; US-82 heads east to Henrietta and Gainesville, US-277 turns southwest at the county line for Seymour and Abilene.
- US-281 – overlaps I-44 north to Oklahoma, then runs south from Wichita Falls through Archer County toward Jacksboro.
- SH-79 and SH-25 – southwest out of the city toward Archer City and Seymour.
- SH-240 and SH-258 – short state routes linking Wichita Falls to Iowa Park and the farm country west of it.
Sheppard Air Force Base
Sheppard Air Force Base occupies a large block immediately north of Wichita Falls, between the city and Burkburnett. It opened during the Second World War and is now a training base rather than an operational flying wing: the 82nd Training Wing teaches aircraft maintenance and other technical trades to thousands of airmen a year, and the 80th Flying Training Wing runs the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training programme, in which instructors and students from more than a dozen NATO countries fly the same syllabus. That programme is the only one of its kind, and it is why European flags fly on a base in North Texas and why the jet traffic overhead is constant.
The base shares its runways with Wichita Falls Regional Airport, which handles the county's commercial flights from a civil terminal on the west side of the field.
Rivers, lakes and the oil towns
The Wichita River runs east across the middle of the county and joins the Red River in Clay County just past the line. Only 5 square miles of the county are water. Lake Wichita, on Holliday Creek at the south edge of the city, was built at the turn of the twentieth century as Wichita Falls' first supply reservoir and is now a shallow city lake with a park and a long-running restoration project. The city's working water comes from outside the county — Lake Arrowhead, southeast in Clay County and the site of a state park, and Lake Kickapoo and Lake Kemp further out.
Burkburnett and Electra are both oil-boom towns. A gusher north of Burkburnett in 1918 produced one of the wildest booms in Texas, with derricks crowded on town lots; the town's story was loosely borrowed for the 1940 film Boom Town. Electra's field came in earlier, around 1911, and gave the town its brief run as a shipping point for crude. Both settled back into small-town size once the shallow pools drew down, but pumpjacks still work the pastures either side of US-287, and the oil business remains part of the county's tax base.