Cottle County Texas map
34.09° N · 100.28° W · County seat: Paducah · 902 sq mi
Cottle County has one incorporated town, Paducah, and 1,380 residents on 901 square miles of Rolling Plains. The forks of the Pease River cross it from west to east, and the crossroads of US-83 and US-70 in the middle of Paducah is the busiest intersection in the county.
Paducah sits near the centre where the north–south and east–west U.S. highways meet. The broken country along the Pease forks runs across the northern half.
Where Cottle County is
The county sits below the Panhandle proper, east of the Caprock escarpment, in the belt of counties between the plains and the Red River breaks. Seven counties surround it: Childress north, Hardeman northeast, Foard east, King south, Dickens southwest, Motley west and Hall northwest.
Nothing large is close. Lubbock is 97 miles southwest in a straight line, Wichita Falls 103 miles southeast, Amarillo 118 miles northwest and Abilene 118 miles southeast. Cottle County was created in 1876 from land assigned to Fannin County and was not organized until 1892; it is named for George Washington Cottle, one of the defenders who died at the Alamo in 1836.
Paducah
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Paducah | Town (county seat) | 1,061 |
Paducah is the only incorporated place in the county and holds about 77 percent of its residents. It has the courthouse, the school, the grain elevators and the highway services; the rest of the population lives on farms and ranches or in unincorporated communities such as Cee Vee. Cottle County was one of the last group of entirely dry counties in Texas and only later approved beer and wine sales, which is a small thing but tells you how recently the local rules changed.
Roads
- US-83 – the north–south route, running up to Childress and the US-287 corridor, and south to Guthrie in King County and on toward Aspermont.
- US-70 – the east–west route through Paducah, east toward Crowell and Vernon, west toward Matador and the Caprock.
- US-62 – shares pavement with US-70 across the county, splitting off outside it.
All three meet at Paducah, and there is no interstate within roughly a hundred miles in any direction. That crossroads position is what has kept a town here: US-83 is the long-haul north–south alternative to I-27 and I-35 for traffic between the Panhandle and the Rio Grande, and Paducah is one of the few fuel and food stops on the Texas stretch of it.
The Pease River country
The North, Middle and South forks of the Pease River all cross Cottle County before joining and running east to the Red River. They are shallow, sandy, usually near-dry channels cut into red beds, and the broken ground along them is rougher than the farmland on the flats between. Only about one square mile of the county's 902 is water — there is no reservoir in the county at all.
The Matador Wildlife Management Area, run by Texas Parks and Wildlife, occupies rough Pease River country in the northwest of the county. It is managed for quail, deer and native grassland, and it is used for public hunting draws, research and controlled-burn work rather than as a park with facilities.
A county that keeps getting smaller
Cottle County's population has been falling for generations: 1,380 at the 2020 census, and a Census Bureau estimate of 1,263 for 2024, a drop of roughly eight percent in four years. Paducah itself is estimated at 967 for 2024, below a thousand for the first time. Cotton, wheat and cattle remain the economy, and mechanisation on the farms has taken people out of the county steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. At 1,380 people over 901 square miles the density works out to about 1.5 residents per square mile.