Coke County Texas map
31.88° N · 100.64° W · County seat: Robert Lee · 928 sq mi
Coke County is where the Colorado River is dammed to water the Permian Basin. E.V. Spence Reservoir fills the valley just above Robert Lee and sends water by pipeline to Big Spring, Odessa and Snyder, which is why a county of 3,285 people has 16 square miles of surface water.
Robert Lee sits below the Spence dam near the centre of the county. Bronte is about 12 miles east on US-277, which is the county's through route.
Where Coke County is
It lies on the northern rim of the Concho Valley, at the edge of the Edwards Plateau where the country starts breaking down into the Rolling Plains. San Angelo is 31 miles southeast and is the market town for everything here; Big Spring is 56 miles northwest, Abilene 66 miles northeast and Midland 85 miles west.
Five counties border it: Nolan north, Runnels east, Tom Green south, Sterling west and Mitchell northwest. Coke County was cut entirely out of Tom Green County in 1889 and named for Richard Coke, the fifteenth governor of Texas, who took office in 1874 at the end of Reconstruction and later served three terms in the U.S. Senate.
E.V. Spence Reservoir
The Colorado River enters Coke County from the northwest and is stopped by Robert Lee Dam a short distance above the town. The lake behind it, E.V. Spence Reservoir, was built by the Colorado River Municipal Water District as a municipal supply rather than a recreation lake, and its water leaves the county by pipeline for Permian Basin cities. Spence is notorious for how far it draws down in drought: in the worst years the lake has fallen to a small fraction of capacity, the boat ramps end well short of the water, and the old roadbeds and foundations flooded when it filled come back into view. Oak Creek Reservoir, a smaller impoundment in the northeast of the county, holds water for the town of Sweetwater in Nolan County.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Robert Lee (county seat) | City | 1,043 |
| Bronte | Town | 939 |
| Blackwell (part) | City | 3 |
Blackwell straddles the county line and is almost entirely in Nolan County; three of its residents were counted on the Coke County side in 2020.
The two real towns take their names from opposite ends of the 19th century: Robert Lee for the Confederate general, Bronte for the novelist Charlotte Brontë, with the accent dropped. Coke County stayed entirely dry for most of its history — one of the last group of prohibition counties in Texas — until a 2005 local option election allowed beer and wine sales.
Roads
- US-277 – the through route, north out of San Angelo past Bronte and on toward Blackwell and Sweetwater.
- SH-158 – east–west across the middle of the county, from Sterling City in the west through Robert Lee and east to Bronte and Ballinger.
- SH-208 – north from Robert Lee across the reservoir arm toward Silver and Colorado City on I-20.
The nearest interstate is I-20 at Colorado City, about 35 miles north of Robert Lee on SH-208.
Fort Chadbourne
In the northeast corner of the county, off US-277 north of Bronte, stand the stone buildings of Fort Chadbourne, an army post established in 1852 to cover the road west and the Butterfield Overland Mail route that later ran through it. The post was abandoned during the Civil War, reoccupied briefly and given up for good in the late 1860s when the frontier line moved west. The site sits on a working ranch whose owners have restored several of the buildings and run a visitor centre and museum on the grounds.