Yoakum County Texas map
33.16° N · 102.83° W · County seat: Plains · 800 sq mi · Central Time
Yoakum County has two towns, and each one came from a different economy. Plains, the county seat in the middle of the county, is a ranching and farming town that predates the oil business. Denver City, in the northwest corner, was laid out in 1938 on top of the Wasson field — one of the largest oil accumulations ever found in Texas — and it is now the larger of the two by three to one.
Centered on Plains. The dense grid of short access tracks in the northwest quarter and along the Gaines County line is the Wasson field; the county's western boundary is the New Mexico state line.
Where Yoakum County is
Yoakum is a border county: its entire western edge is the New Mexico state line, with Lea County, New Mexico on the other side. That line is also a time-zone line — Lea County keeps Mountain Time, so a drive west out of Plains on US-82 or US-380 costs you an hour.
Cochran County is north, Hockley at the northeast corner, Terry east and Gaines south. Lubbock is 63 miles northeast, Midland 92 miles southeast and Odessa 95 miles southeast; Hobbs, New Mexico is closer than any of them. At 800 square miles, Yoakum is one of the smaller of the plains squares, and it has effectively no surface water at all.
The two towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Denver City (part) | Town | 4,465 |
| Plains (county seat) | Town | 1,356 |
Denver City straddles the line into Gaines County, with the large majority of it here; the figure above is the Yoakum County part. It took its name from the Denver Producing and Refining Company, whose crews were working the field when the townsite was platted, and it went up fast enough to be a genuine boomtown — a grid of streets on open plains with a tank farm at the edge. Plains, by contrast, was established around 1903 as a ranch-country town and won the county seat when Yoakum organized in 1907. Nearly a quarter of the county's people live outside both towns, mostly on farms and in oil-field housing.
Roads
- US-82 – east to Brownfield in Terry County, west out of Plains to the New Mexico line toward Lovington.
- US-380 – runs with US-82 through Plains for part of its route, then continues west to the state line.
- SH-214 – the north–south route: north from Denver City through Cochran and Bailey counties toward Muleshoe, south into Gaines County.
- SH-83 – southeast from Denver City toward Seagraves and Seminole.
- No interstate – the nearest interstate access is I-20 at Odessa, about 95 miles southeast, or I-27 at Lubbock.
The Wasson field
The Wasson field was discovered in the second half of the 1930s and proved to run for miles beneath the Yoakum–Gaines county line. It produces from the San Andres and Clear Fork carbonates, and its size — measured in billions of barrels of oil originally in place — put it among the largest fields ever developed in the United States. Denver City was built to work it and has never had another reason to exist.
What makes Wasson worth knowing about is what happened after the easy oil came out. The field's Denver Unit became one of the earliest large-scale carbon-dioxide flooding projects in the country: CO2 is piped in, injected into the reservoir where it mixes with the remaining oil and thins it, and the mixture is produced back and separated. That is why the map of the northwest quarter of the county is a dense mesh of well pads, injection lines and pipeline rights-of-way rather than the clean farm grid you see further east. Yoakum County has stayed a significant oil producer for close to ninety years because of it.
The county was one of the 1876 squares cut from the Bexar District and was organized in 1907. It is named for Henderson King Yoakum, a soldier and lawyer who wrote an early history of Texas.