Hall County Texas map
34.45° N · 100.58° W · County seat: Memphis · 904 sq mi
Hall County lies at the bottom corner of the Panhandle where the plains have already fallen off the Caprock and the country is red dirt, mesquite and Red River forks. Its 2,825 people are spread over 904 square miles of what was cotton land, and its best-known address is Turkey, the town where Bob Wills grew up and where his band is still celebrated every April.
Memphis sits on US-287 in the middle of the county. Turkey is in the southwest, near the Briscoe County line.
Where Hall County is
The county is on the southeastern edge of the Panhandle, 89 miles southeast of Amarillo and 95 miles northeast of Lubbock in straight lines, with Wichita Falls 125 miles down US-287. Six counties border it: Donley north, Collingsworth northeast, Childress east, Cottle southeast, Motley south and Briscoe west.
West of the county line the land climbs the Caprock Escarpment onto the Llano Estacado; inside Hall County it is Rolling Plains, cut by the Prairie Dog Town Fork and the Salt Fork of the Red River. That is unusual company for a Panhandle county — 21 of its 904 square miles are counted as water, most of it river channel. Everything is in the 13th congressional district and on Central Time.
Towns below the Caprock
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Memphis | City · county seat | 2,045 |
| Turkey | City | 321 |
| Estelline | Town | 121 |
| Lakeview | Town | 59 |
Nearly nine in ten residents of the county live in one of these four places, and about 280 live outside them. Memphis has the courthouse, the hospital and the school district that draws from most of the county.
Roads
- US-287 – the main line, running northwest to Clarendon and Amarillo and southeast through Estelline to Childress, Vernon and Fort Worth.
- SH-70 – crosses the county north to south, meeting US-287 at Estelline and running on toward Matador.
- SH-86 – the Turkey road, heading west toward Quitaque and Silverton at the foot of the Caprock.
- SH-256 – leaves US-287 at Memphis and runs west across the county.
US-287 through Hall County is the diagonal that carries most Amarillo–Dallas–Fort Worth traffic, and Memphis and Estelline are the two towns on it. There is no interstate in the county and no four-lane crossing except 287 itself.
Turkey, Bob Wills and the rail-trail
Bob Wills, the fiddler who put western swing together with the Texas Playboys, spent his childhood on farms around Turkey and worked as a barber there before the band years. The town keeps a museum in his name and holds Bob Wills Day on the last Saturday in April, which for one weekend multiplies its 321 residents many times over. Turkey also has the old Hotel Turkey, a two-storey brick building from the cotton era that still takes guests.
The other reason people drive into the county is the Caprock Canyons Trailway, a converted railroad grade that runs east off the escarpment from Briscoe County and ends at Estelline in the southeast corner of Hall County. The line it follows was built to move cotton and cattle out of this country; the crop is largely gone, and so is most of the population that grew it. The county was created in 1876 from the Bexar land district, organized in 1890, and named for Warren D. C. Hall, secretary of war for the Republic of Texas.