Archer County Texas map
33.62° N · 98.69° W · County seat: Archer City · 925 sq mi
Archer County is the southern half of the Wichita Falls metropolitan area — oil-patch prairie with six small incorporated towns and no large one. Its county seat, Archer City, is known far beyond North Texas as Larry McMurtry's hometown, the setting he wrote about in The Last Picture Show and the place where he filled several storefronts on the courthouse square with second-hand books.
Archer City sits near the middle of the county on US-281. Holliday and Lakeside City are in the north near the Wichita Falls line; Windthorst and Scotland are to the east.
Where Archer County is
The county has seven neighbors: Wichita County north, Clay County east, Jack County southeast, Young County south, Throckmorton County southwest, Baylor County west and Wilbarger County northwest.
Wichita Falls is only 23 miles northeast, and Archer County is counted as part of its metropolitan area; the northern towns are commuter towns for it. Everything else is a long drive — Fort Worth is 98 miles southeast, Denton 94 miles and Abilene 101 miles southwest. No interstate crosses the county; I-44 ends at Wichita Falls just to the north.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Archer City | City (county seat) | 1,604 |
| Holliday | City | 1,526 |
| Lakeside City | Town | 1,076 |
| Scotland | City | 415 |
| Windthorst (part) | Town | 328 |
| Megargel | Town | 176 |
Windthorst straddles the line into Clay County, so the figure above counts only the Archer County side. Windthorst and Scotland were founded by German Catholic families in the 1890s and are still built around their churches and parish schools; Lakeside City is a lake-shore residential town on the Wichita Falls edge with no real downtown.
Roads
- US-82 / US-277 – run together across the north of the county through Holliday, east to Wichita Falls and west to Seymour in Baylor County.
- US-281 – the north–south route, from Wichita Falls south through Archer City toward Jacksboro and eventually the Hill Country.
- SH-79 – leaves Archer City to the southwest for Throckmorton.
- SH-25 – runs west from Archer City through Megargel toward Seymour.
- SH-114 – clips the southern part of the county on its way from Seymour east to Olney and Jacksboro.
Archer City, books and film
Larry McMurtry grew up on a ranch outside Archer City and used the town as the model for Thalia in his novels. The Last Picture Show was filmed on location here in 1971, in black and white, with the Royal Theater on the square standing in for the closing movie house; the sequel Texasville was shot in the same streets in 1990. The Royal burned and was later rebuilt as a community theater.
From the late 1980s McMurtry moved his antiquarian book business, Booked Up, to Archer City and spread hundreds of thousands of volumes across several buildings on and near the square — an improbable thing to find in a town of 1,600, and for years a destination for book dealers and collectors. In 2012 he auctioned off most of the stock in a sale he called The Last Book Sale, keeping one building open. McMurtry died in 2021; the shop and the square remain the reason most visitors come.
Water and oil
For a dry county, Archer holds a surprising amount of water: 22 of its 925 square miles. Lake Kickapoo, on the North Fork of the Little Wichita River in the northeast, is one of the reservoirs that supplies Wichita Falls, and Lake Diversion sits on the Wichita River at the Baylor County line, catching water released from Lake Kemp upstream. Neither lake exists for Archer County's own use — both were built to water a city outside it.
The other underground business is oil. Archer County lies in the old North Texas oil belt that boomed around Electra and Burkburnett after 1911, and its shallow fields have been pumped ever since. The pumpjacks scattered through the mesquite pastures are mostly stripper wells producing a few barrels a day, but collectively they have kept the county's tax base and its mineral owners going for a century.