Delta County Texas map
33.39° N · 95.67° W · County seat: Cooper · 278 sq mi · Central Time
Delta County is named after its own shape. The North Sulphur River runs along one side, the South Sulphur along the other, and the two meet at the eastern end to close a triangle that looks like the Greek letter delta. Inside it are 278 square miles, 5,230 people and one town of any size.
Cooper sits at the center of the wedge. The two Sulphur River forks converge at the county's eastern point; Jim Chapman Lake backs up along the southern one.
Where Delta County is
The county was organized in 1870 out of pieces of Hopkins and Lamar counties, and unlike almost every other Texas county it commemorates no soldier or politician — just the shape the two rivers left behind.
It touches six counties: Lamar to the north, Red River to the northeast, Franklin to the southeast, Hopkins to the south, Hunt to the southwest and Fannin to the northwest. It sits on the seam where the Blackland Prairie gives out and the timber of East Texas begins. Paris is about 20 miles north of Cooper, and the nearest big-city edge of the Metroplex — McKinney — is around 57 miles southwest.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Cooper | City · county seat and largest city | 1,901 |
| Pecan Gap (part) | City | 163 |
Those are the only two incorporated places in the county; Pecan Gap extends across the line into Fannin County. Ben Franklin, Klondike, Enloe and Charleston are unincorporated communities.
Roads
- SH-24 – the main road, running southwest to northeast through Cooper between Commerce in Hunt County and Paris in Lamar County.
- SH-19 – crosses SH-24 at Cooper, heading north to the Lamar County line and south across the South Sulphur toward Sulphur Springs.
- SH-154 – runs southeast out of Cooper toward Mount Vernon and Franklin County.
- FM-1529, FM-64 and FM-128 – the farm roads that reach the river bottoms and the lake access points.
There is no interstate, no U.S. highway and no four-lane divided route anywhere in Delta County. Every road in and out is a two-lane state highway or a farm-to-market road, and the shortest way to I-30 is south through Hopkins County.
Jim Chapman Lake and Cooper Lake State Park
The South Sulphur River was dammed below Cooper to create the reservoir officially named Jim Chapman Lake, though nearly everyone still calls it Cooper Lake. It supplies water to cities well to the west and it accounts for most of the 21 square miles of water inside a county that has only 257 square miles of land — a water share of about 7.6 percent, high for a county with no natural lake.
Cooper Lake State Park is split into two separate units on opposite shores. The Doctors Creek unit is the Delta County side, reached from SH-154 south of Cooper, with camping, a swimming beach and boat ramps; the South Sulphur unit lies across the water in Hopkins County. Driving between them takes far longer than the distance across the lake suggests.
The river bottoms
Both Sulphur forks were straightened and channelized decades ago to drain the bottomland for farming, and the North Sulphur cut has since eroded into a deep, bare-walled ditch that exposes marine chalk of Cretaceous age. The banks below Ladonia are one of the better-known fossil-collecting spots in North Texas, turning up shark teeth, ammonites and mosasaur material after every rise in the water. Between the two rivers the land is flat, black and planted in row crops and hay, with cattle on the parts too wet to plough.