Hutchinson County Texas map
35.84° N · 101.36° W · County seat: Stinnett · 895 sq mi
Hutchinson County is where the Canadian River, the Panhandle oil field and the Panhandle's only large reservoir all land in the same 895 square miles. Borger, its biggest town, was thrown up in 1926 as an oil boom camp and still runs a refinery and petrochemical complex; ten miles northwest, Sanford Dam holds back Lake Meredith, the water supply for Amarillo and Lubbock.
Stinnett has the courthouse; Borger is southeast of it. The blue arm across the southwest of the county is Lake Meredith on the Canadian River.
Where Hutchinson County is
The county is 50 miles northeast of Amarillo in a straight line, the closest of the northern-tier counties to the region's only city. Five counties touch it: Hansford north, Roberts east, Carson south, Moore west and Sherman at the northwest corner.
The Canadian River enters from Moore County and cuts across the southwest, and its valley — flooded now for most of that distance — divides the flat farming plain in the north from the broken ground south of the water. Eight of the county's 895 square miles are water, nearly all of it Lake Meredith. Hutchinson is on Central Time and in the 13th congressional district.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Borger | City | 12,555 |
| Fritch (part) | City | 1,847 |
| Stinnett | City · county seat | 1,651 |
| Sanford | Town | 134 |
Fritch straddles the line with Moore County; only nine of its residents live on the Moore side. Borger has six times the population of the county seat — one of the wider seat-to-largest-town gaps in the Panhandle.
Roads
- SH-136 – the Amarillo road: southwest past Fritch to Amarillo, northeast through Borger and Stinnett toward Spearman.
- SH-152 – east–west across the south of the county, connecting Dumas, Borger and Pampa.
- SH-207 – north–south through Stinnett, running up to Spearman and south across the river toward Panhandle and Claude.
- Spurs 119, 140, 245 and 246 – four short state spurs of a few miles each, linking the main highways to lake access roads and plant gates.
There is no interstate and no U.S. highway anywhere in the county, which is unusual for a county of 20,000 people; I-40 is about 45 road miles south of Borger by way of SH-207 or SH-136.
Borger and the oil boom
Oil came in on the Panhandle field in 1926 and Ace Borger laid out a townsite to catch it. The population arrived in weeks rather than years, in tents and shacks along a single street, and the town was rough enough that the Texas Rangers were sent in and martial law declared before the decade was out. What stayed after the boom was industry: a refinery that has run continuously since the 1920s, carbon black plants that burned Panhandle gas for pigment, and gas processing that strips helium and liquids out of the field's unusually rich gas. Phillips Petroleum built its first refinery here, and the petrochemical works east of Borger is still the county's largest employer. Stinnett, the county seat since the county was organized in 1901, stayed small and administrative.
Lake Meredith and Adobe Walls
Sanford Dam closed the Canadian River in the 1960s to supply eleven Panhandle and South Plains cities, creating Lake Meredith — the only major reservoir in the region. It is now a national recreation area, with boat ramps at Sanford-Yake and Fritch Fortress and swimming and camping around the arms; lake levels have swung dramatically with drought, at times leaving ramps far above the water. Just across the line in Potter County, the Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument protects the pits where people quarried banded flint for more than 10,000 years.
North of Stinnett, a granite marker on private ranch land is all that is left of Adobe Walls, the trading post where buffalo hunters held off a large Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne force in June 1874 — the fight that opened the Red River War and, with it, the settlement of the Panhandle. The county is named for Andrew Hutchinson, an early Texas attorney, and was cut out of the Bexar district in 1876.