King County Texas map
33.61° N · 100.25° W · County seat: Guthrie · 913 sq mi
King County counted 265 people in 2020, which makes it the second-least populated county in Texas and one of the three or four emptiest in the United States. It has no incorporated town at all: Guthrie, the county seat, is a census-designated place at a highway crossing, and the largest single presence in the county is a ranch.
King County on the Rolling Plains. US-82 and US-83 meet at Guthrie; the rest of the county is ranchland cut by the head draws of the Wichita and Brazos rivers.
Where King County is
Eight counties touch King County, more than most: Cottle north, Foard at the northeast corner, Knox east, Haskell at the southeast corner, Stonewall south, Kent at the southwest corner, Dickens west and Motley at the northwest corner. Abilene is 86 miles southeast, Lubbock 93 miles west and Wichita Falls 103 miles northeast.
The county was laid out in 1876 from the Bexar District and named for William Philip King, a teenaged Gonzales volunteer killed at the Alamo. It was not organised until 1891, and the population has never passed a few thousand.
The county in numbers
| Population, 2020 census | 265 |
| Population, 2024 estimate | 215 |
| Land area | 911 sq mi |
| People per square mile | about 0.3 |
| Incorporated cities or towns | 0 |
| Rank by population in Texas | 253rd of 254 |
Guthrie is an unincorporated community and CDP. The county school district at Guthrie is one of the smallest in Texas and serves the whole county from a single campus.
Two U.S. highways
- US-82, carrying State Highway 114 with it, crosses east–west through Guthrie between Benjamin in Knox County and Dickens on the Caprock.
- US-83 runs north–south through Guthrie, from Paducah in Cottle County down to Aspermont in Stonewall County.
- State Highway 222 leaves the southeast toward Knox City.
The two U.S. highways cross at Guthrie, which is why the courthouse, the store and the fuel stop are all within a few hundred yards of each other. Away from those two routes the county is served by ranch roads.
The 6666 Ranch
The Four Sixes headquarters stands on US-82 at Guthrie: a 1917 stone house and a set of barns and pens that function as the working centre of one of the best-known cattle and quarter-horse operations in Texas. Samuel Burk Burnett put the ranch together in the late 19th century, and his descendants held it until 2021, when the Guthrie property was sold to an ownership group led by the screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. The ranch's land makes up a large share of the county's surface.
Ranching of this scale explains the emptiness. There are no farms broken into quarter sections here, no oil boom town and no railroad; the terrain is broken grassland and red-dirt breaks draining into the head forks of the Wichita River and the Salt Fork of the Brazos. What people there are work cattle, run the school, or keep the county offices open.