Lynn County Texas map
33.18° N · 101.82° W · County seat: Tahoka · 894 sq mi · Central Time
Lynn County is one county south of Lubbock, and the thing that put people on it was a lake. Tahoka Lake, a large saline basin in the northeast of the county fed by seep springs, was one of the very few dependable water sources on the open Llano Estacado — a Comanche camping ground, then a buffalo hunters' camp, then the reason a county seat named Tahoka was surveyed a few miles away.
Centered on Tahoka at the crossing of US-87 and US-380. The pale ovals scattered across the county are playa basins; the largest, in the northeast, is Tahoka Lake.
Where Lynn County is
Lubbock County is directly north, Crosby at the northeast corner and Garza east. Borden touches the southeast corner, Dawson is south, Terry west and Hockley off the northwest corner.
Lubbock is 28 miles north of the county line, close enough that Tahoka commuters drive it daily. Big Spring is 67 miles southeast, Midland 83 miles southwest. The eastern edge of the county is where the Llano Estacado begins to fray toward the Caprock escarpment in Garza County; the rest is level plain in cotton.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Tahoka (county seat) | City | 2,373 |
| O'Donnell (part) | City | 607 |
| Wilson | City | 431 |
| New Home | City | 323 |
Four incorporated places, all small, hold a little over half the county's people; the rest live on farms. O'Donnell sits on the Dawson County line at the south end of the county — its most-remembered resident is the actor Dan Blocker, who grew up there and is commemorated in the town. Wilson, in the east, was settled largely by German Catholic families and has the cotton gin and the school that go with a plains farm town of its size. New Home is on US-87 between Tahoka and Lubbock.
Roads
- US-87 – the main north–south route, four lanes for much of its length: north through New Home to Lubbock, south through O'Donnell to Lamesa and Big Spring.
- US-380 – east–west through Tahoka: west to Brownfield in Terry County, east to Post in Garza County.
- US-84 – cuts across the far northeast corner of the county on the diagonal between Slaton and Post.
- Farm-to-market roads – FM 41 runs east from US-87 to Wilson and on toward the Garza County line; the remaining county roads follow section lines a mile apart.
Tahoka Lake and the county's water
Tahoka Lake is a shallow saline basin several miles across, the largest of the hundreds of playas that pit this county. Playas do not drain anywhere: they collect runoff, hold it for a few weeks and then lose it to evaporation and to slow seepage that recharges the Ogallala aquifer underneath. Tahoka Lake is unusual in that spring seeps at its margin kept water available in dry seasons, which is what made it a landmark for the Comanches and the comancheros, and later for the buffalo-hide hunters working the southern herd in the 1870s. The wildflower called the Tahoka daisy carries the name.
Below the surface, the Ogallala is what farms Lynn County. Irrigation from it turned this from a ranching county into a cotton county in the first half of the twentieth century, and the census still records only about 2 square miles of surface water in the whole 894 — every drop of it in a playa.
Lynn County was laid out in 1876 from the old Bexar District and organized in 1903. It is named for William Lynn, a soldier of the Texas Revolution believed to have died at the Alamo; the county seat's name is a separate borrowing, taken from the lake.