Lipscomb County Texas map
36.28° N · 100.27° W · County seat: Lipscomb · 932 sq mi
Lipscomb County is the northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle, with Oklahoma on two sides of it, and it is one of the few counties in Texas whose seat is not an incorporated town: Lipscomb is a village of a few dozen people around a courthouse, while the county's four actual towns — Booker, Follett, Higgins and Darrouzett — sit out on a railroad line laid across the county in 1919.
The courthouse village of Lipscomb is near the centre. The county's north and east edges are both the Oklahoma state line.
Where Lipscomb County is
Two of the county's four sides are state lines: Beaver County, Oklahoma is north across the 36°30′ parallel, and Ellis County, Oklahoma is east across the 100th meridian. Neither is linked here. Inside Texas the neighbours are Hemphill south, Roberts southwest and Ochiltree west.
Amarillo is 114 miles southwest in a straight line — farther than any other county in the Panhandle's northern tier — and Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas, and Wichita Falls are all realistic drives from here. Wolf Creek runs southeast across the county toward the Canadian River, and the land along it breaks into low hills and sandy draws; the rest is level wheat and grass. The county has essentially no surface water — a tenth of a square mile out of 932. It is on Central Time and in the 13th congressional district.
Four towns and a courthouse village
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Booker (part) | Town | 1,413 |
| Follett | City | 377 |
| Higgins | City | 361 |
| Darrouzett | Town | 316 |
Booker straddles the line with Ochiltree County; 20 of its residents live on the Ochiltree side. Lipscomb, the county seat, is unincorporated and has no separate census count of its own.
Booker, Follett and Darrouzett all owe their positions to the same event. In 1919 a railway branch was built west across the top of the county, and the existing settlements moved to meet it — buildings were dragged to the new sidings, in Booker's case from a townsite over the line in Oklahoma. Higgins, in the southeast on US-60, is older; it grew up on the earlier Santa Fe line through the Canadian River country.
Roads
- US-83 – the main north–south route, entering from Perryton, passing Booker and running south to Canadian.
- US-60 – crosses the southeast corner through Higgins and on into Oklahoma toward Arnett.
- SH-15 – the east–west road along the north of the county through Darrouzett and Follett.
- SH-23, SH-213, SH-305 and Spur 188 – the state roads that tie Lipscomb, Follett and the section-line grid to the two U.S. highways.
There is no four-lane road and no interstate in the county. The nearest interstate access is I-40 at Shamrock, roughly 90 road miles south on US-83.
The 1947 tornado and what the wheat pays for
On the evening of 9 April 1947 a tornado that had already crossed the Texas Panhandle destroyed most of Higgins, killed people there and at Glazier just south of the county line, and went on into Oklahoma to level Woodward in the deadliest tornado in that state's history. Higgins rebuilt smaller. It is the single event that anyone in the county will mention first, and the reason so few pre-war buildings stand in that town while Follett and Darrouzett kept theirs.
The working county is wheat, milo, cattle and gas. Lipscomb sits on the northwest shelf of the Anadarko Basin, and gas wells drilled from the 1950s onward pay a large share of the tax base for four small school districts. The county was created out of the Bexar district in 1876 and organized in 1887; it is named for Abner S. Lipscomb, secretary of state of the Republic of Texas and later a justice of the Texas Supreme Court. The courthouse village that carries his name has held the seat since the beginning, even as the towns grew up around the railroad to the north.