Hockley County Texas map
33.61° N · 102.34° W · County seat: Levelland · 908 sq mi · Central Time
Hockley County is a square of cotton country immediately west of Lubbock that happens to sit on top of two of the largest oil fields in Texas. The Slaughter field runs under its western townships and the Levelland field lies beneath the county seat, and for most of the second half of the twentieth century that combination kept Hockley among the state's top oil-producing counties while the surface stayed in row crop.
Centered on Levelland. The straight north–south and east–west roads on the map are section lines from the original survey; almost every field boundary in the county follows one.
Where Hockley County is
Hockley sits in the second tier of counties in from the New Mexico line, 28 miles west of Lubbock. Lamb County is north and Hale touches the northeast corner. Lubbock County is east, Lynn southeast and Terry south. Yoakum lies off the southwest corner, Cochran is west and Bailey northwest.
The whole county is on the Llano Estacado, roughly 3,300 to 3,700 feet above sea level, with no river and no natural drainage outlet — rainfall collects in shallow playa basins instead of running off. Midland is 112 miles southeast and Amarillo 115 miles northeast.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Levelland (county seat) | City | 12,657 |
| Sundown | City | 1,290 |
| Anton | City | 929 |
| Smyer | Town | 436 |
| Ropesville | City | 429 |
| Opdyke West | Town | 221 |
Levelland holds about six of every ten people in the county. It was laid out in 1912 and took its name from the flatness of the surrounding land. It is also a college town: South Plains College, a two-year public college opened in 1958, sits on the north side of town and is best known outside the region for its country and bluegrass music program. Sundown, in the southwest, was built by and for the oil field. Anton and Smyer are farm towns on the roads to Lubbock, and Opdyke West is a small incorporated town just outside Levelland.
Roads
- SH-114 – the main east–west route: Lubbock, Smyer, Levelland, then west past Whiteface toward Morton in Cochran County.
- US-385 – north–south through Levelland; north to Littlefield in Lamb County, south to Brownfield.
- US-62 / US-82 – crosses the southeast corner through Ropesville between Lubbock and Brownfield.
- US-84 – clips the northeast corner at Anton on the diagonal run from Lubbock to Littlefield and Clovis, New Mexico.
- The farm-to-market grid – nearly every remaining road in the county runs due north–south or due east–west on a section line, one or two miles apart.
The Slaughter and Levelland oil fields
The Slaughter field was opened in the mid-1930s on the old C. C. Slaughter ranch lands and spreads across western Hockley into Cochran and Terry counties. The Levelland field followed in the 1940s, directly under and around the county seat. Both produce from the San Andres formation, a shallow carbonate that gives up its oil slowly, which is why the fields have been under waterflood and then carbon-dioxide injection for decades rather than being drilled and abandoned. Pumping units standing in cotton rows are the ordinary landscape here.
The county was created in 1876 out of the Bexar District along with the rest of the Panhandle and South Plains squares, but nobody organized it until 1921 — ranching alone never put enough people on the ground. Cotton farming arrived first, oil second, and both are still here. Hockley is named for George Washington Hockley, chief of staff of the Texas Army at San Jacinto and later secretary of war of the Republic.