Mitchell County Texas map
32.30° N · 100.92° W · County seat: Colorado City · 916 sq mi
The Colorado River crosses Mitchell County from northwest to southeast, and everything here follows from that: a cattle-shipping town on the crossing, two reservoirs built off it, a power plant that needed the cooling water, and a state park on the lake shore. Colorado City called itself the Mother City of West Texas when it was the westernmost town on the railroad.
Colorado City sits on I-20 at the river crossing. Lake Colorado City is on Morgan Creek to the southwest.
Where Mitchell County is
Mitchell is the eastern end of the Permian Basin counties, where I-20 leaves the oil country and enters the rolling plains toward Sweetwater and Abilene. Scurry County is north, Fisher northeast, Nolan east, Coke southeast, Sterling south, Howard west and Borden northwest — seven neighbors in all.
Big Spring is 33 miles west on I-20, Abilene 70 miles east, San Angelo 65 miles southeast on SH-208, and Midland 71 miles southwest. The county was created from Bexar County land in 1876 and organized in 1881, the year the Texas and Pacific Railway reached the river. It is named for Asa and Eli Mitchell, brothers who fought in the Texas Revolution.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| Colorado City (county seat) | City | 3,990 |
| Loraine | Town | 506 |
| Westbrook | City | 202 |
Loraine is 12 miles east of Colorado City on I-20 and Westbrook 12 miles west, both on the interstate and the railroad. Cuthbert, Spade and Buford are unincorporated. Note that Colorado City is not on the Colorado River's canyon country in Central Texas and has no connection to the state of Colorado; the river reaches it here as a shallow, sandy stream a long way above Austin.
Roads
- I-20 – the east–west spine, running through Westbrook, Colorado City and Loraine, with the Union Pacific main line alongside it.
- SH-208 – south from Colorado City to Robert Lee and San Angelo; north toward Snyder in Scurry County.
- SH-163 – south from Colorado City toward Sterling City, crossing the ranch country of the county's southern half.
- SH-350 – northwest from I-20 toward Big Spring by way of Forsan in Howard County.
- Business I-20 – the old highway through downtown Colorado City.
The lakes and the state park
Mitchell County holds two reservoirs, both built on tributaries rather than on the Colorado itself. Lake Colorado City, the larger, was impounded on Morgan Creek in the late 1940s to supply cooling water for the Morgan Creek power station, which was one of the first big steam plants built to serve West Texas. Lake Champion is the smaller of the pair. Neither is a flood-control lake; both exist because industry and towns out here needed a dependable surface supply in a county that averages around 20 inches of rain.
Lake Colorado City State Park occupies about 500 acres on the lake's southern shore, reached from I-20 by FM 2836. It has campsites, a boat ramp, a fishing pier and a few miles of trail through mesquite and shinnery. Because the lake takes warm water from the power plant, it stays fishable later into the winter than most West Texas reservoirs, and it is the closest state park to Big Spring, Snyder and Sweetwater.
The Colorado River itself enters the county in the northwest, runs past the north side of Colorado City and leaves southeast toward Coke County and E.V. Spence Reservoir. This is the upper Colorado, hundreds of miles above the Highland Lakes, and for much of the year it is a braided channel of sand.
Cattle, oil and wind
Colorado City was the last stop on the railroad when the line reached it in 1881, which briefly made it the supply point and cattle-shipping station for ranches across a huge stretch of West Texas — the origin of the "Mother City" claim, and of a downtown that is larger than a town of 4,000 would build for itself. Oil came in the 1920s and the county has produced steadily since, on the shallow eastern shelf of the Permian rather than the deep basin.
The newest layer is wind. The mesas and ridges running from Mitchell County east into Nolan County carry one of the densest concentrations of wind turbines in the United States, and turbine blades move through Colorado City on I-20 on their way to the sites. The 2024 Census estimate leaves the county essentially flat at 8,968.