Baylor County Texas map
33.62° N · 99.21° W · County seat: Seymour · 901 sq mi
Baylor County sits on the Rolling Plains where the Brazos River swings through the southeast corner and the Wichita River is dammed in the north. Seymour, its only town, was a crossing point long before it was a county seat — trail herds forded the Brazos near here on the way north — and it holds the highest temperature ever recorded in Texas.
Seymour is near the center of the county where US-82/US-277 crosses US-183/US-283. Lake Kemp fills the northeast; the Brazos runs across the southeastern corner.
Where Baylor County is
Eight counties border it: Wilbarger north, Wichita northeast, Archer east, Young southeast, Throckmorton south, Haskell southwest, Knox west and Foard northwest.
Wichita Falls is 46 miles northeast on US-82 and is the county's nearest city and hospital center. Abilene is 86 miles southwest, Fort Worth 124 miles southeast. No interstate comes near; the closest are I-44 at Wichita Falls and I-20 at Abilene.
Seymour
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Seymour | City (county seat) | 2,580 |
Seymour is the county's only incorporated place and holds about three quarters of its people. Westover, Bomarton, Mabelle and Round Timber are unincorporated. The county economy is wheat, cotton, cattle and hunting leases; the Seymour Aquifer under the county's sandy terrace soils supplies the irrigation that makes the crop farming possible.
Roads
- US-82 / US-277 – run together east–west through Seymour, east to Archer County and Wichita Falls, west to Benjamin and on toward Lubbock and Abilene respectively.
- US-183 / US-283 – run together north–south through Seymour, north to Vernon and south to Throckmorton and Albany.
- SH-114 – leaves Seymour to the east for Olney, Jacksboro and ultimately the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
Seymour is therefore a four-way US highway junction, which is why a town of 2,580 has a highway commercial strip and a truck stop. The routes cross within a few blocks of the courthouse square.
The Brazos crossing
The Brazos River enters Baylor County from the southwest and cuts across the southeastern corner into Young County. This far upstream it is a wide, shallow, sandy channel between salt-cedar banks rather than the deep river it becomes below Waco, and for most of the year it can be walked across.
That is exactly why it mattered. In the late 1870s and 1880s the Great Western Cattle Trail — the Dodge City trail that replaced the Chisholm — came north through this country, crossing the Brazos in the vicinity of Seymour before running on to Doan's Crossing on the Red River. Millions of cattle passed up that route, and Seymour grew as a supply point on it. The town was settled in the 1870s and the county organized in 1879, both driven by the trail traffic and the buffalo hunters who preceded it. US-183/283 crosses the Brazos south of town today on roughly the same north–south line.
Lake Kemp and the 1936 record
Baylor County has 34 square miles of water, nearly four percent of its area, almost all of it Lake Kemp. The lake was built on the Wichita River in the 1920s for irrigation and municipal supply and is one of the larger reservoirs in this part of Texas by surface area. Its water is naturally salty — the Wichita drains gypsum and salt beds upstream — which limits its use and gives it a reputation for good catfish and unpredictable levels. Lake Diversion, immediately downstream on the Archer County line, re-regulates releases from it.
On 12 August 1936 the thermometer at Seymour reached 120 °F, still the highest temperature ever recorded in Texas; Monahans matched it in June 1994, and no station in the state has beaten it. The county is named for Henry Weidner Baylor, a physician who served as a surgeon with the Texas Rangers in the Mexican–American War — not for the university at Waco, which honors the judge R. E. B. Baylor.