Armstrong County Texas map
34.96° N · 101.36° W · County seat: Claude · 914 sq mi
Armstrong County holds the upper end of Palo Duro Canyon and the headquarters country of the JA Ranch, the outfit Charles Goodnight and John Adair started in the canyon in 1876. With 1,848 people in 914 square miles it is one of the emptiest counties in the Panhandle, and its only town, Claude, sits on US-287 between Amarillo and Clarendon.
Claude sits near the center of the county on US-287. Zoom in on the southwest corner to see the canyon country cut by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.
Where Armstrong County is
Armstrong is a near-square county in the central Panhandle, one tier east of the Amarillo counties. Carson County is north and Gray touches the northeast corner. Donley is east, Briscoe south, Swisher southwest, Randall west and Potter northwest. Seven counties border it and every one of them is in Texas.
Amarillo lies about 32 miles northwest, which makes Claude a commuter town as much as a ranching town. Lubbock is roughly 100 miles southwest and Wichita Falls about 179 miles southeast down the US-287 diagonal.
The county straddles the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado. North and east of Claude the land is flat High Plains farmland; in the southwest the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River and its tributaries have cut several hundred feet down into red rock, and that gash is the eastern continuation of Palo Duro Canyon.
Towns in the county
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | City, county seat | 1,189 |
Claude is the county's only incorporated place; the rest of the 1,848 residents live on farms and ranches or in unincorporated settlements. Goodnight, on US-287 about halfway to the Donley County line, grew up around Charles Goodnight's home place. Washburn sits at the north end of the county where the highway meets the railroad. The 1963 film Hud was shot in and around Claude, and the courthouse square still reads as it did then.
Claude was named for Claude Ayers, an engineer on the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway line that built through in the 1880s.
Roads
- US-287 – the Amarillo–Fort Worth diagonal, entering from the northwest, passing through Claude and Goodnight and leaving east into Donley County toward Clarendon. It is the county's only four-lane route and carries most of the truck traffic between the Panhandle and the Metroplex.
- SH-207 – the north–south route. From Claude it runs north to Panhandle in Carson County and south across the canyon country to Silverton in Briscoe County. The southern stretch drops off the Caprock, crosses the Prairie Dog Town Fork and climbs back out; it is one of the few paved crossings of the canyon system anywhere in the Panhandle.
There is no interstate in Armstrong County. I-40 runs about 15 miles north of Claude through Carson and Donley counties, so drivers between Amarillo and Oklahoma City bypass the county entirely.
The JA Ranch and Charles Goodnight
Goodnight drove cattle into Palo Duro Canyon in 1876, using the canyon walls as a natural corral, and the following year took the Irish investor John Adair as a partner. They named the brand JA after Adair's initials. At its peak the ranch ran across several Panhandle counties, and it is still a working operation more than a century later — one of the oldest continuously run ranches in Texas.
Goodnight built a two-story house near the settlement that now carries his name, on the US-287 side of the county, and it has been restored as a historical center. He and his wife Mary Ann Goodnight also gathered orphaned bison calves in the 1880s at a time when the southern herd was nearly gone. Descendants of that herd survive as the official Texas State Bison Herd, kept today at Caprock Canyons State Park in neighboring Briscoe County.
Ranching still sets the pattern of land use here. The canyon breaks in the southwest are grazing country; the level ground north of US-287 is dryland wheat, milo and cotton, with wind turbines standing along the county's northern tier.