Fisher County Texas map
32.74° N · 100.40° W · County seat: Roby · 902 sq mi
Roby is one of the smallest county seats in Texas, with 589 residents in 2020 — less than half the size of Rotan, the town up the road in the same county. Fisher County has 3,672 people in all, and more wind turbines than either town has houses.
Roby sits at the centre on US-180. Rotan is northwest of it; Hamlin lies on the eastern county line, mostly in Jones County.
Where Fisher County is
Fisher County sits on the Rolling Plains north of Sweetwater and Snyder, in the block of square counties between the Caprock and the Brazos breaks. Seven counties border it: Stonewall north, Jones east, Taylor southeast, Nolan south, Mitchell southwest, Scurry west and Kent northwest.
Abilene is 44 miles southeast in a straight line, the closest city of any size; Big Spring is 71 miles southwest, San Angelo 88 miles south and Lubbock 102 miles northwest. The nearest interstate is I-20, a short run south through Sweetwater, and the county's traffic funnels down to it.
The county was created in 1876 out of land assigned to Bexar County and organized ten years later, in 1886. It is named for Samuel Rhoads Fisher, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence who served as secretary of the navy of the Republic of Texas.
Roby, Rotan and Hamlin
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Rotan | City | 1,334 |
| Roby | City (county seat) | 589 |
Fisher County is one of the counties where the seat is not the biggest town: Rotan, in the northwest on State Highway 70, has more than twice Roby's population, and both are dwarfed by nearby Sweetwater and Snyder in adjoining counties. A third city, Hamlin, straddles the eastern county line but lies mostly in Jones County, so its residents are counted there.
Roby's other claim to notice is the 1996 Lotto Texas jackpot: a group of Roby residents pooled their tickets and split a multi-million-dollar prize, a story that briefly turned a town of a few hundred people into national news. Fisher County was for many years an entirely dry county and is now fully wet.
Roads
- US-180 – the main east–west road, through Roby, east toward Anson and Albany, west toward Snyder and the Permian Basin.
- State Highway 70 – the north–south route, through Rotan and up toward Aspermont, south to Sweetwater and I-20.
- State Highway 92 – a shorter route linking the eastern side of the county toward Hamlin and the Jones County line.
There is no interstate and no US highway running north–south, which means almost everything moving through Fisher County is either local or headed for I-20 at Sweetwater. The Rotan–Roby–Sweetwater axis on State Highway 70 is the county's main line of travel.
Turbines on the rise
The country south and west of Roby is part of the Roscoe wind development, one of the largest onshore wind projects in the United States when it was completed, with turbines spread across parts of Fisher, Nolan, Scurry and Mitchell counties. The turbines share the ground with cotton and grazing — the land underneath stays in production, and the lease payments have become a steady share of farm income here, in a county where the population has been flat to falling for decades.
Nolan County next door built its economy around wind first, and Fisher County has followed the same pattern: little new construction in the towns, a good deal of new steel in the fields. The high ground and the reliable prevailing wind across the Rolling Plains are the reason this stretch of Texas carries so much of the state's generating capacity.
Population: 3,672 at the 2020 census, with a Census Bureau estimate of 3,665 for 2024 — one of the steadier small-county figures in the region.