Mills County Texas map
31.50° N · 98.60° W · County seat: Goldthwaite · 750 sq mi
Mills County has 4,456 residents in 750 square miles and exactly two incorporated places, Goldthwaite and Mullin. The Colorado River runs along its southwestern edge, and the last suspension bridge in Texas still open to cars crosses it there, at Regency.
Goldthwaite sits at the centre where US-84, US-183 and SH-16 come together; Mullin is nine miles northwest on US-84. The Colorado River is the diagonal boundary along the southwest.
Where Mills County is
Five counties border it, one fewer than most: Comanche north, Hamilton northeast, Lampasas southeast, San Saba southwest and Brown northwest. The San Saba line is the Colorado River itself. Killeen is 57 miles southeast in a straight line and Waco 85 miles east; Fredericksburg is 86 miles southwest, Round Rock 87 miles southeast. There is no interstate within an hour and no city of 20,000 within fifty miles, which is the plain fact behind the county's size and its population.
Mills was one of the last counties created in this part of the state, cut on 15 March 1887 from parts of Brown, Comanche, Hamilton and Lampasas counties — the four counties it still borders on every side but the southwest. It is named for John T. Mills, a Republic of Texas district judge who later served on the state bench. Goldthwaite was laid out the same year the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe railway built through, and it has been the seat since organisation.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Goldthwaite | City (county seat) | 1,729 |
| Mullin | Town | 128 |
Between them the two towns account for about 42 percent of the county's people; the majority of Mills County lives on ranch and farm roads. Priddy, Star, Center City, Regency and Ebony are unincorporated communities with a school, a store or a church between them. Center City, north of Goldthwaite on US-84, is named for the claim that it sits near the geographic centre of Texas — a marker there commemorates the idea, though the official centre point is usually put in McCulloch County.
Roads
- US-84 – the northwest–southeast route through Mullin and Goldthwaite, up toward Brownwood and down toward Evant and Gatesville.
- US-183 – north–south through Goldthwaite, up toward Comanche and down toward Lampasas.
- State Highway 16 – southwest out of Goldthwaite across the Colorado toward San Saba and Llano; north toward Comanche.
- FM 574 – west from Goldthwaite toward Brownwood and the Brown County line.
- FM 45 and FM 500 – the ranch roads that reach the Regency bridge and the Colorado River bottoms in the far southwest.
The Colorado and the Regency bridge
The Colorado River forms the whole southwestern boundary with San Saba County, cutting a valley of pecan bottoms and limestone bluffs. Three separate bridges at Regency washed out or collapsed before the present one was built in 1939 — a wire-cable suspension span carrying a single lane of gravel road across the river. It is the last suspension bridge in Texas still open to vehicle traffic, and the county roads that reach it from either side are unpaved, so it stays a working farm crossing rather than a monument.
The Colorado bottoms are also the county's pecan country. Native and improved pecans along the river and its tributaries have been harvested commercially here for over a century, and orchards run downstream into San Saba County.
Goats, sheep and cedar
Mills County sits at the northern end of the Texas sheep and goat belt. The Edwards Plateau counties to the south have long produced most of the mohair and a large share of the wool in the United States, and Mills County was for decades one of the leading Angora goat counties on the northern edge of that range. Goats and sheep work the cedar and shin-oak country that will not support cattle at any density, and the Goldthwaite auction and the county's wool and mohair warehouses grew up on that trade. Beef cattle, hay and hunting leases — white-tailed deer, turkey and feral hogs — make up the rest of the rural economy.
The county has almost no surface water: two square miles in total, all of it river and stock tanks. There is no reservoir, no state park and no lake town here, which is a large part of why the population has stayed near 4,000 to 5,000 since the 1930s while the counties on the I-35 corridor multiplied.