Martin County Texas map
32.31° N · 101.96° W · County seat: Stanton · 916 sq mi
Martin County was settled by German Catholic colonists who named their town Marienfeld and built a Carmelite monastery on the plains before the drought broke them. The town is Stanton now, the monastery ruin is a landmark on the edge of it, and the ground the colonists tried to farm turned out to sit on the northern end of the Spraberry Trend.
Stanton is on I-20 in the south-center of the county, roughly midway between Midland and Big Spring.
Where Martin County is
Martin sits at the top of the Permian Basin, on the flat southern shelf of the Llano Estacado. It has seven neighbors, more than most counties in this part of the state: Dawson north, Borden northeast, Howard east, Glasscock southeast, Midland south, Andrews west and Gaines northwest.
Stanton is 23 miles north of Midland and 29 miles west of Big Spring, both on I-20, which puts the county squarely inside the Midland–Odessa commuting range. Odessa is 40 miles southwest and Lubbock 88 miles north. Martin County is counted as part of the Midland–Odessa combined statistical area, and the northern edge of Midland's city limits actually crosses the county line, putting 48 Midland residents in Martin County at the 2020 census.
The county was created out of Bexar County land in 1876 and organized in 1884, named for Wylie Martin, a soldier of the Texas Revolution and a legislator of the Republic.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| Stanton (county seat) | City | 2,652 |
| Ackerly (part) | City | 93 |
| Midland (part) | City | 48 |
Ackerly straddles the Dawson County line and Midland the Midland County line; the figures are the parts inside Martin County.
Half the county's residents live outside any incorporated place. Lenorah, Tarzan, Flower Grove and Courtney are unincorporated farm communities, each usually a gin, a church and a school-bus stop. Tarzan, in the northwest of the county, got its name when a settler applying for a post office in the 1920s sent in a list of possible names and the Post Office Department picked that one; it is the only Tarzan in the United States.
Roads
- I-20 – crosses the southern third of the county east–west through Stanton, with Business I-20 following the old highway through town beside the Union Pacific line that began as the Texas and Pacific.
- SH-137 – the north–south route, running from Lamesa down through Stanton and on toward Garden City in Glasscock County.
- SH-176 – the road west from Big Spring toward Andrews, crossing the northern part of the county.
- Farm-to-market grid – the rest of the county is a section-line network of FM and county roads serving cotton fields and well pads; there is no US highway.
Marienfeld, and what came after
The town began in 1881 as a stop on the Texas and Pacific Railway, and in the following year a group of German Catholic colonists recruited from the Midwest took up land around it and named the place Marienfeld — "Mary's field." Carmelite friars came with them and built a monastery and, later, a convent and school in the open country. The settlement's premise was that the high plains could be farmed the way Iowa was farmed. The drought years of the late 1880s ended that argument; most of the colonists left, the Carmelites withdrew, and the town was renamed Stanton in 1890 after Edwin M. Stanton. The convent building survived long enough to become a Catholic school and is now the town's historical landmark, and the Catholic parish that the colony founded is still there.
Ranching replaced the colony, cotton replaced part of the ranching once windmills and later irrigation wells reached the Ogallala, and oil arrived last. The northern portion of the Spraberry Trend runs beneath most of Martin County, and horizontal drilling into the Spraberry and Wolfcamp after 2010 made it one of the most heavily drilled counties in the basin. The visible county now mixes all three eras: cotton modules stacked at the gin in Lenorah, cattle on the unplowed sections, and drilling rigs and tank batteries between them.
There is no reservoir, no river and no state park in the county. Rainfall averages under 16 inches a year, the land is flat enough that grain elevators and rig masts are the tallest things in sight, and the county's water comes from wells.