Moore County Texas map
35.84° N · 101.89° W · County seat: Dumas · 910 sq mi
Moore County runs on cattle, beef and hydrocarbons: feedyards across the plain north of Amarillo, one of the country's larger beef packing plants at Cactus, and a refinery in the open country near Sunray fed by the Panhandle field. It is also the rare Panhandle county that is growing — the 2024 Census estimate puts it above its 2020 count, while every county around it has lost people.
Dumas sits on US-87/US-287 in the middle of the county; Cactus is north on the same road and Sunray is northeast.
Where Moore County is
Moore is 43 miles north of Amarillo in a straight line, an hour up US-87. Eight counties border it and every one of them is in Texas — no state line, no river boundary, just the Panhandle survey grid: Sherman north, Hansford northeast, Hutchinson east, Carson southeast, Potter south, Oldham southwest, Hartley west and Dallam northwest.
The Canadian River clips the southeast corner on its way toward Lake Meredith, and the county's ten square miles of water are mostly there. Everything else is flat irrigated plain at about 3,600 feet, worked in centre-pivot circles that are obvious from the air and from the map at high zoom. Moore is on Central Time and in the 13th congressional district.
Dumas, Cactus and Sunray
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Dumas | City · county seat | 14,501 |
| Cactus | City | 3,050 |
| Sunray | City | 1,710 |
| Fritch (part) | City | 9 |
Fritch is almost entirely in Hutchinson County; nine of its residents live on the Moore side of the line. Dumas gives its name to the county's micropolitan statistical area, which covers all of Moore County.
Cactus began as a wartime ordnance works site and became a packing town; its population is heavily foreign-born, with workers drawn from Central America, Southeast Asia and East Africa to the plant. Sunray, 20 miles northeast of Dumas, was built beside gas plants and the refinery.
Roads
- US-87 and US-287 – run together north from Amarillo through Dumas, then split: US-87 northwest toward Dalhart and Texline, US-287 north through Cactus to Stratford and the Oklahoma Panhandle.
- SH-152 – east from Dumas to Borger.
- SH-354 – west from Dumas to Channing in Hartley County.
- SH-136 – crosses the southeast corner near Fritch on the Amarillo–Borger run.
US-87/US-287 through Dumas is a four-lane divided highway and one of the busiest truck corridors in the Panhandle, carrying cattle, grain and packing-plant traffic. The nearest interstate is I-40 at Amarillo, about 47 road miles south.
Feedyards, packing and refining
The chain here is short and local. Corn and silage grow under pivots on Ogallala water; the crop is fed to cattle in yards across Moore and the counties around it; the cattle are killed and boxed at the Cactus plant, which runs several thousand head a day and is one of the largest employers in the northern Panhandle. Trucks then move the boxed beef out on US-287.
The other half of the economy is underground. Moore County sits on the western end of the Panhandle gas field, whose gas is unusually rich in helium; the federal helium plant built near Masterson in the county separated and shipped it for decades. The refinery north of Dumas near Sunray processes crude piped in from West Texas and New Mexico and is one of the largest inland refineries in the region. Gas processing plants and gathering lines run between the pivots throughout the northern half of the county.
The county was created from the Bexar district in 1876, organized in 1892, and named for Edwin Ward Moore, commodore of the navy of the Republic of Texas — an odd name for a county 500 miles from salt water, and one of several Panhandle counties named for republic-era officials who never saw the place.