Castro County Texas map
34.53° N · 102.26° W · County seat: Dimmitt · 899 sq mi
Castro County is table-flat irrigated farm country with no river running through it — its only surface water is a scatter of shallow playa basins that fill after storms and dry again. Corn, silage, feedyards and dairies drive the economy, and the small town of Nazareth in the northeast was settled by German Catholic farmers who came here in 1902.
Dimmitt sits at the crossing of US-385 and SH-86 near the middle of the county. Zoom in and the circular marks across the farmland are center-pivot irrigation.
Where Castro County is
Castro sits on the southwestern side of the Panhandle counties, on the Llano Estacado well above the Caprock. Deaf Smith County is north, Randall northeast, Swisher east, Hale southeast, Lamb south and Parmer west. It is one county short of the New Mexico line.
Lubbock is the nearest big city, roughly 70 miles southeast; Amarillo is about 53 miles northeast. Castro is in the 19th congressional district, unlike most of its Panhandle neighbours, which are in the 13th.
Elevation across the county runs high and changes very little — this is one of the flattest large blocks of land in Texas. The 5 square miles the Census counts as water are almost entirely playas, the round clay-floored depressions that are the natural recharge points for the Ogallala aquifer beneath.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Dimmitt | City, county seat | 4,146 |
| Hart | City | 869 |
| Nazareth | City | 308 |
Dimmitt holds more than half the county's population and has the courthouse, the hospital and the county's main grocery and farm supply trade. Hart lies in the northeast quarter, Nazareth in the north-center. All three are farm-service towns; the county has no unincorporated community of any size.
Roads
- US-385 – the main north–south route, entering from Hereford in Deaf Smith County, running through Dimmitt and leaving south toward Springlake and Littlefield in Lamb County.
- SH-86 – the main east–west route, crossing Dimmitt and continuing east to Tulia in Swisher County and west toward Bovina in Parmer County.
- SH-194 – runs northeast out of Dimmitt through the Nazareth country toward the Swisher County line.
There is no interstate. The nearest is I-27, about 25 miles east through Swisher and Hale counties, and I-40 about 55 miles north. Farm-to-market roads on the survey grid do most of the work here, and Hart is reached from the farm road network north of SH-86 rather than from a state highway of its own.
Nazareth and the farm colony
Nazareth was founded in 1902 by Father Joseph Reisdorff, a Catholic priest who recruited German-speaking farming families from the Midwest to buy land on the newly opened plains. The town grew around Holy Family Church, and for a century the parish has been the centre of the settlement's identity — the county's Catholic population is unusually high for the Panhandle because of it. Nazareth's school is small enough that its entire enrolment would fit in one hallway of an urban high school, yet its girls basketball program is among the most decorated in Texas.
The county's name is a geographic accident worth noting: Henri Castro was a French-born empresario who brought Alsatian settlers to Texas in the 1840s, but his colony was Castroville, roughly 500 miles southeast near San Antonio. He had nothing to do with the High Plains. The Legislature marked out this county from the Bexar District in 1876 and attached his name to it; the county was not organized until 1891.
What made Castro County productive was irrigation. Once deep wells could lift water from the Ogallala after the Second World War, dryland wheat country turned into corn, silage and cotton under center-pivot sprinklers, and cattle feedyards and later large dairies followed the cheap feed. The aquifer is the county's central long-term question: recharge from the playas is slow, and water policy matters more here than almost anywhere else in Texas.