Young County Texas map
33.16° N · 98.68° W · County seat: Graham · 930 sq mi · Central Time
Young County is where the Brazos River becomes one river. The Clear Fork comes up from the southwest and meets the main stem near Fort Belknap, and the joined stream then swings southeast into the upper end of Possum Kingdom Lake. The county was settled early, abandoned during the frontier wars of the 1860s, and organised for good only in 1874.
Graham is centre-east on US-380. Olney is west, Newcastle north on the Brazos, and Possum Kingdom Lake reaches into the southeastern corner.
Where Young County is
The county was created in 1856 from parts of Bosque and Fannin counties and named for William Cocke Young, a settler who served as a sheriff and a United States marshal in North Texas. It was organised once, lost its county government during the raids of the Civil War years when many families withdrew east, and was reorganised in 1874 as the frontier line moved west again.
Six counties border it: Archer north, Jack east, Palo Pinto southeast, Stephens south, Throckmorton west and Baylor northwest. There is no interstate and no four-lane highway across the county. Wichita Falls is 53 miles northeast, Fort Worth 83 miles southeast and Abilene 79 miles southwest, so Graham sits roughly equidistant from three regional centres and acts as its own.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Graham | City · county seat | 8,731 |
| Olney | City | 3,006 |
| Newcastle | City | 527 |
Three incorporated cities hold about 12,300 of the county's 17,867 people. Graham is the trade and hospital town; Olney, 25 miles west on SH-79, has its own school district, airport and industrial base and looks toward Seymour and Throckmorton as much as toward Graham. Newcastle, in the north near the Brazos, grew around coal mining in the early twentieth century and is now a small farming community.
Graham's downtown is built around an unusually wide open square, and the courthouse stands at one end of it rather than in the middle — a layout locals describe as one of the largest downtown squares in the country. The claim is hard to test, but the space is genuinely bigger than the standard Texas courthouse square.
Roads
- US-380 – the main east–west route, through Graham and east to Jacksboro in Jack County, west toward Throckmorton.
- SH-16 – north–south through Graham, north toward Olney and Archer City, south across the Brazos toward Breckenridge in Stephens County.
- SH-79 – northwest out of Graham through Olney and on toward Archer City and Seymour.
- SH-114 – runs east from Olney through Loving toward Jacksboro and, far beyond, the Metroplex.
- SH-67 – comes up from Breckenridge into the southern part of the county and ends at Graham.
Fort Belknap
Fort Belknap was established in 1851 on the Brazos near the site of present-day Newcastle, at the northern end of a chain of army posts built to screen the settlement line. It served as a supply point and a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail route in the late 1850s, and the two Brazos Indian reservations set up nearby in 1854 were administered from it. The reservations were broken up in 1859 and their people moved into Indian Territory; the fort was largely abandoned during the Civil War.
Several of the stone buildings were reconstructed in the 1930s, and the site south of Newcastle is now maintained as a county park and museum with the original well, the magazine and a corn house among the standing structures. It is one of the more complete surviving frontier fort sites in North Texas.
The Brazos and Possum Kingdom
The main stem of the Brazos enters from Baylor County in the northwest and runs southeast across the county. The Clear Fork of the Brazos comes in from Throckmorton County and joins it in the northern half — the last of the river's three great forks to come in, and the point below which the Brazos runs as a single river all the way to the Gulf.
Downstream the river backs up into the head of Possum Kingdom Lake, whose upper arm reaches into Young County's southeastern corner; most of the reservoir lies in Palo Pinto County behind Morris Sheppard Dam. Closer to town, Lake Graham and Lake Eddleman are two small municipal reservoirs on Salt Creek that supply the city and provide most of its boating and fishing water. Together the lakes and the river account for 16 of the county's 930 square miles.
Olney's other distinction is an event rather than a landform: the town has hosted a one-arm dove hunt each September since the early 1970s, open to hunters who have lost an arm, and it draws entrants from well outside Texas.