Big Spring, Texas map

Big Spring stands on I-20 at the eastern edge of the Permian Basin, 40 miles east of Midland and 60 miles east of Odessa. It is also the point where two landforms meet: the Llano Estacado breaks off to the north and the Edwards Plateau begins to the south, with Beals Creek — the lower end of Sulphur Draw, and a tributary of the Colorado River — running through the middle of town along the seam. That is why the ground west and north of the city is flat cotton country while the land immediately south rises into broken mesas.

Howard County covers 904 square miles and its 2020 population was 34,860, three-quarters of it inside Big Spring. The county was created in 1876, organized in 1882, and named for Volney E. Howard, a Texas congressman. Its neighbors are Borden to the north, Mitchell east, Sterling southeast, Glasscock south, Martin west and Dawson northwest.

Big Spring State Park sits on top of Scenic Mountain, the limestone-capped mesa on the southwest edge of the city. A paved loop road runs around the rim of the bluff and gives a view across the whole basin — on a clear day the horizon is thirty miles out in three directions, and the mesa is the highest thing in sight. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the road, the pavilion and the stone work in the 1930s. Below the mesa, the original spring in the draw stopped flowing early in the twentieth century once wells drew the water table down; the pool there now is maintained artificially. Comanche Trail Park, south of downtown, holds a city lake and an amphitheatre.

Oil was found in Howard County in the 1920s and the field has been worked ever since, but the thing that keeps Big Spring distinct from the drilling towns around it is the refinery on the east side, one of the small inland refineries in West Texas and a plant that has run in one form or another since the 1920s. The city also carries a state hospital and a federal correctional complex, and its airport occupies the runways of Webb Air Force Base, a pilot training field that closed in the 1970s. Downtown, the fifteen-story Hotel Settles — built in 1930 on oil money and restored a decade ago — is the tallest building between Midland and Abilene.