Loving County Texas map

Loving occupies the far northwestern corner of Texas below New Mexico, west of the oil counties and east of the Pecos. Winkler County is east, Ward southeast and Reeves southwest. North and northwest the boundary is the New Mexico state line, against Lea County and Eddy County — both of which are on Mountain Time while Loving keeps Central, so the clock changes at the fence.

At 677 square miles it is also the smallest county by area in the Permian Basin, and it is the only Texas county with no incorporated municipality and no census-designated place of any size. The nearest cities with anything in them are Odessa, 70 miles east, and Midland, 88 miles northeast. Pecos, in Reeves County, is the closest town of any consequence and is where much of the county's business is done.

Mentone is the county seat and the only settlement. It stands at the crossing of SH-302 and RM 652 and consists of the courthouse, a post office, a café, a church and a scattering of houses and trailers. The courthouse dates from the 1930s, and the county's records, its single voting place and its sheriff's office are all inside it. There is no school district office in the county — school-age children ride to Wink, across the line in Winkler County.

The population figures are small enough that a single family moving changes the ranking: 64 people in 2020, with the Census Bureau's 2024 estimate at 48. Almost everyone employed in the county works in oil and gas, and the daytime population is many times the residential one because service crews drive in from Pecos, Kermit and Monahans.

The county was created in 1887 out of Tom Green County and named for Oliver Loving, the cattleman who with Charles Goodnight drove the first herds up the trail that carries both their names, and who died of wounds taken on that trail in 1867. Loving County's first organization, in the 1890s, was found to be fraudulent and annulled; the county was then run from Reeves County until it was organized again in 1931, which is why its founding documents carry two dates.

The Pecos River is the county's western boundary for its whole length, running southeast out of New Mexico toward its meeting with the Rio Grande. Along the northwestern corner, where Loving, Reeves and Eddy County, New Mexico come together, the river is dammed into Red Bluff Reservoir — the northernmost reservoir on the Texas Pecos and the county's only body of water. Its water is used for irrigation downstream in Reeves and Ward counties, and its level swings widely from year to year with releases from New Mexico.

The river is not a water supply here. Salinity in the lower Pecos rose through the twentieth century until the water became unusable for households, and the groundwater under most of the county carries gypsum. Drinking water is trucked or piped in from Kermit and Pecos. That single fact explains a great deal about why the county never filled up: the terrain is flat Chihuahuan-edge desert of creosote, range grass and cactus with salt cedar along the river, elevations run around 2,700 feet, and there was never enough usable water to support farming at any scale.

What the county does have is oil. The Delaware Basin — the western half of the Permian Basin — lies under all of it, and horizontal drilling after 2010 pushed Loving County's production to levels that would suit a county many times its population. The tax base built on that production is why 64 people maintain a courthouse, a road crew and a full slate of elected offices.