Donley County Texas map
34.96° N · 100.82° W · County seat: Clarendon · 933 sq mi
Clarendon was founded in 1878 as a Methodist temperance colony, which made it one of the first permanent towns in the Texas Panhandle and earned it the cowboy nickname "Saints' Roost." Donley County still has the oldest college in the Panhandle, a county government organized in 1882 when most of its neighbours were empty range, and a reservoir on the Salt Fork of the Red River with a lakeside town built around it.
Clarendon sits at the center on US-287. Greenbelt Lake is the water body just north of town; I-40 clips across the northern part of the county.
Where Donley County is
Donley sits in the eastern Panhandle, at the point where the plains start to break down toward the Red River country. Gray County is north, Wheeler northeast, Collingsworth east, Hall south, Briscoe southwest, Armstrong west and Carson off the northwest corner.
Amarillo is about 60 miles northwest on US-287 or I-40, close enough that Clarendon is a regular stop rather than an isolated one. Lubbock is roughly 112 miles southwest and Wichita Falls about 151 miles southeast.
The Salt Fork of the Red River crosses the county from northwest to southeast, and its valley and side canyons give Donley more relief than the flat counties west of it. The northern third, along I-40, is level plains; the south and east are rougher grazing ground cut by creeks running to the river.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Clarendon | City, county seat | 1,881 |
| Howardwick | City | 364 |
| Hedley | City | 276 |
Three incorporated cities, none of them large. Hedley sits southeast of Clarendon on US-287 near the Hall County line. Howardwick is the unusual one: it is a lake community on Greenbelt Lake that incorporated as a city in its own right, and most of its lots were platted as weekend cabins rather than town blocks. Lelia Lake and Jericho are unincorporated points on the highway and the interstate.
Roads
- I-40 – crosses the northern part of the county east–west between Amarillo and the Oklahoma line. There is no town on it inside Donley County, only interchanges with the farm roads; the stretch follows the old US-66 route.
- US-287 – the four-lane Amarillo–Fort Worth diagonal, running through Clarendon, Lelia Lake and Hedley. This is the county's main street as much as its main highway.
- SH-70 – the north–south route through Clarendon, running north past Greenbelt Lake toward Pampa in Gray County and south toward Turkey.
- SH-273 – a short state route in the north of the county linking the interstate corridor to SH-70.
US-287 and I-40 diverge just west of the county, then run 15 to 20 miles apart across it — the reason a place this small has two long-distance highways.
Saints' Roost and Clarendon College
Lewis Henry Carhart, a Methodist minister, laid out Clarendon in 1878 on the Salt Fork as a sober alternative to the saloon towns of the frontier: no liquor was to be sold there. Trail hands working the surrounding ranches took to calling it the Saints' Roost, and the name stuck; the local museum still uses it. The colony was only the third town established in the Panhandle, and when the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway built through in 1887 on a line several miles south, the whole town picked up and moved to meet it. That relocated site is the Clarendon on the map today.
The Methodists founded Clarendon College in 1898. It is the oldest college in the Texas Panhandle, and after passing to the public sector it now operates as a community college district with its main campus in town — an unusual thing for a county of 3,258 people to support, and one of the county's largest employers.
Greenbelt Lake
Greenbelt Lake sits on the Salt Fork of the Red River a few miles north of Clarendon, impounded by a dam built by a regional water authority in the 1960s to supply Clarendon and other towns down the line in this dry corner of the state. It accounts for most of the county's 6 square miles of water. The lake is open for fishing, boating and camping, and the shoreline development on its south side is what became the city of Howardwick. In a county with no state park and no river you would call navigable, it is the recreation the map has to offer, and it draws weekend traffic from Amarillo along SH-70.
The county was marked out of the Bexar District in 1876 and organized in 1882, earlier than almost any of its neighbours, and is named for Stockton P. Donley, a frontier lawyer who served on the Texas Supreme Court.