Comanche County Texas map
31.95° N · 98.55° W · County seat: Comanche · 948 sq mi
Comanche County farms sand. The Cross Timbers soils on its northern side grow peanuts and orchard peaches rather than the cotton and wheat of the counties around it, and De Leon has run a peach and melon festival since the 1930s on the strength of it. Proctor Lake, on the Leon River northeast of the county seat, is the only large reservoir for 40 miles.
Comanche sits centre-south where US-67 and US-377 run together. De Leon is northwest, Gustine east, and Proctor Lake is the reservoir in the northeastern corner.
Where Comanche County is
The county sits on the northern edge of the Edwards Plateau where it breaks into the Cross Timbers, about 60 miles north of the geographic centre of Texas. Five counties border it: Erath to the northeast, Hamilton southeast, Mills south, Brown southwest and Eastland northwest.
Nothing large is close. Killeen is 75 miles southeast in a straight line, Abilene 77 miles northwest, Waco 87 miles southeast and Fort Worth 90 miles northeast. No interstate comes anywhere near, and no town in the county reaches 5,000 people, so Comanche and De Leon between them do the work of a trade centre for a wide stretch of country.
The county was created in 1856 from Bosque and Coryell counties and named for the Comanche, the people who controlled this country until the 1870s and raided the frontier settlements here through the Civil War years. This was the outer line of Anglo settlement in the 1850s and 1860s, and the county's early history is mostly a record of that.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Comanche | City (county seat) | 4,208 |
| De Leon | City | 2,259 |
| Gustine | Town | 395 |
Three incorporated places hold roughly half the county's 13,594 people. Everything else is unincorporated: Proctor by the lake, Sipe Springs, Energy, Downing, Hasse and Comyn among them. Cora, the county's first seat, no longer exists as a town at all — the county government moved to the more central site of Comanche in 1859, three years after organization, and Cora emptied out.
Roads
- US-67 and US-377 – run together through Comanche on a southwest–northeast line, southwest to Brownwood and northeast to Dublin and Stephenville.
- SH-36 – the northwest–southeast route, up through De Leon toward Cisco and down past Gustine toward Hamilton.
- SH-16 – south from Comanche toward Goldthwaite and the Hill Country, north toward Dublin.
- Farm to Market roads – the lake roads off US-377 and SH-16 give the access to Proctor Lake's parks and boat ramps; there is no highway along the shoreline.
Peanuts, peaches and the sandy land
The band of deep sandy soil across the northern part of the county drains fast and warms early, which suits peanuts and orchard fruit and does not suit row-crop cotton. Comanche County has been one of the leading peanut-producing counties in Texas for decades, and irrigated peanut and pecan ground on the sand is a different landscape from the dryland blackland fields a county or two east of here.
De Leon built a festival on the fruit side of it. The De Leon Peach and Melon Festival has been held in late summer since the 1930s, and it is the county's largest annual gathering. Dairying and beef cattle fill out the rest of the agricultural economy, with pecans along the river bottoms.
Proctor Lake and Old Cora
Proctor Lake was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Leon River in the county's northeastern corner, and it accounts for nearly all of the 10 square miles of water in the county. It is a flood-control and water-supply reservoir with Corps parks around the shoreline — Sowell Creek, Copperas Creek and High Point among them — offering camping, boat ramps and a swimming area, and it draws anglers for hybrid striped bass and crappie.
On the courthouse square in Comanche stands Old Cora, a small squared-log building put up in 1856 as the first courthouse of the county at the vanished settlement of Cora. It was moved to the square and preserved, and it is generally identified as the oldest surviving courthouse building in Texas. The present Comanche County Courthouse, a 1939 building, stands beside it.