Borden County Texas map
32.74° N · 101.44° W · County seat: Gail · 906 sq mi
Borden County had 631 people in 2020 and does not contain a single incorporated town. The county and its seat split one man's name between them: Gail Borden Jr., the surveyor and newspaper publisher who patented condensed milk. The county took his surname, the county seat took his first.
Gail sits near the middle of the county on US-180. The southeastern corner holds the Borden County arm of Lake J.B. Thomas.
Where Borden County is
Borden sits below the Caprock Escarpment on the rough ground where the Llano Estacado breaks down toward the Colorado River. Seven counties touch it: Garza to the north, Scurry to the east, Mitchell to the southeast, Howard to the south, Martin to the southwest, Dawson to the west and Lynn to the northwest.
The nearest city of any size is Big Spring, about 34 miles south. Lubbock lies 63 miles northwest and Midland the same distance southwest, which puts Borden roughly on the seam between the South Plains cotton country and the oil counties of the Permian Basin. The county keeps Central Time and votes in the 19th congressional district.
A county with no city in it
The Census Bureau lists no incorporated place in Borden County. Gail, the seat, is an unincorporated community clustered around the courthouse square, and it is where the county's school, its post office and its one crossroads business district are. Everything else in the county is ranch headquarters, oilfield lease road and scattered rural address. Only a handful of Texas counties are organized this way, and Borden is the emptiest of them on the plains, with fewer than one resident per square mile.
The 2024 census estimate puts the county at 557, a decline of roughly one in nine since 2020. Land use explains the arithmetic: cattle ranching on the broken country, dryland and some irrigated cotton on the flatter western tables, and oil and gas leases worked by crews who mostly live in Big Spring, Lamesa or Snyder.
Because Gail is unincorporated, Borden County has no city government, no municipal police department and no city sales tax.
The two roads
- US-180 – the east–west route across the middle of the county, running east toward Snyder in Scurry County and west toward Lamesa in Dawson County. It passes through Gail.
- FM 669 – the north–south farm road that meets US-180 at Gail and carries most of the county's local traffic between the Garza County line and the southern ranches.
There is no interstate, no US route running north–south and no railroad in service across the county. Drivers heading between Lubbock and the Permian Basin normally use US-87 through Dawson County instead, which is why Borden stays quiet.
Lake J.B. Thomas and the Colorado River
Almost all of the county's 9 square miles of water sits in one place. Lake J.B. Thomas is a reservoir on the Colorado River in the southeastern corner of Borden County, shared with Scurry County. It was built by the Colorado River Municipal Water District, and the water it stores is piped out of the county entirely, to Big Spring, Snyder and Odessa. The lake level swings hard with drought, and in the driest years the reservoir has fallen to a fraction of its capacity while the district leans on its other lakes downstream.
The river valley and its side canyons are the reason Borden looks nothing like the flat, square-fielded counties directly north of it. Above the breaks the land is table-flat plains farmed over the Ogallala aquifer; below them it is mesquite, cedar and red rock draining to the Colorado.