Dallam County Texas map
36.29° N · 102.59° W · County seat: Dalhart · 1,505 sq mi
Dallam County is the northwest corner of Texas. Its corner post is the point where Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico meet, which makes Dallam one of only three Texas counties that border two other states — Bowie and Cass, at the opposite corner of the state, are the others. It is also the only county in Texas crossed by US-54.
Dalhart is at the county's southeast corner, split across the line into Hartley County. The straight northern boundary is the Oklahoma Panhandle; the straight western boundary is New Mexico.
Where Dallam County is
Only three of Dallam's neighbours are Texas counties: Sherman to the east, Moore off the southeast corner and Hartley to the south. North is Cimarron County, Oklahoma — the westernmost county of the Oklahoma Panhandle — and west is Union County, New Mexico.
The northwest corner of the county is the Texas–Oklahoma–New Mexico tripoint, where the 103rd meridian meets the parallel of 36°30′ north. Everything on the map north of that line and west of that meridian stopped being Texas in the Compromise of 1850.
Amarillo is about 85 miles southeast, and it is the nearest city of any size in any direction: Dalhart's other options are Clayton, New Mexico, and Guymon, Oklahoma, both smaller. Lubbock is roughly 192 miles southeast.
At 1,505 square miles Dallam is well above the Panhandle's usual county size, and with 7,115 people it works out to fewer than five residents per square mile. The land is high, dry shortgrass plain sloping toward the Rita Blanca Creek drainage, with almost no permanent surface water — the Census counts just 2 square miles of it.
Towns in the county
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Dalhart (part) | City, county seat | 5,493 |
| Texline | Town | 454 |
Dalhart straddles the Dallam–Hartley county line; the figure above is the part inside Dallam County, and the rest of the city lies in Hartley County to the south. The name is a contraction of the two county names. Texline sits at the far west of the county, a mile or so from the New Mexico state line, and was named for the boundary it stands on.
Roads
- US-87 / US-287 – run together northwest out of Dalhart through Texline and into New Mexico toward Clayton and Raton; southeast they split, US-87 toward Hartley and Amarillo, US-287 toward Dumas.
- US-54 – enters the state only here. It runs northeast from Dalhart toward Stratford in Sherman County and on into the Oklahoma Panhandle, following the old Rock Island alignment on a diagonal that ignores the survey grid.
- US-385 – heads north out of Dalhart across the county to the Oklahoma line and Boise City.
- SH-102 – a short state route serving the farming country east of Dalhart.
Five highways converge on Dalhart, which is why a town of this size has the truck stops and rail yard it does. There is no interstate in the county; I-40 is about 60 miles south through Oldham County.
XIT country, the Dust Bowl and Rita Blanca
Nearly all of Dallam County was once part of the XIT Ranch, the three-million-acre spread that a Chicago syndicate received from the State of Texas in payment for building the state Capitol in Austin in the 1880s. The XIT covered ten Panhandle counties in a strip along the New Mexico line, and Dallam was its northern end. The ranch was broken up and sold off in parcels from around 1901, and that sale is what created the farming pattern the county still has. Dalhart keeps the memory alive with the XIT Rodeo and Reunion each August, an amateur rodeo that has run since 1936, and with the XIT Museum in town.
The county was also close to the centre of the Dust Bowl. When the plough turned the shortgrass sod and the rains failed in the 1930s, Dallam County lost topsoil and people together, and the Dalhart newspaper became one of the loudest voices arguing that the region would come back. Some of the worst-damaged sections were bought by the federal government and replanted to grass; that land is now the Rita Blanca National Grassland, spread across the north of Dallam County and across the line into Cimarron County, Oklahoma. It is grazed under permit and open to the public, and it is the largest block of public land anywhere in the Panhandle.
Today the county's economy runs on cattle and water: feedyards, some of the largest dairies in Texas, and irrigated corn and silage grown to supply them. The county is named for James Wilmer Dallam, a lawyer and publisher who compiled the early decisions of the Texas Supreme Court.