Ochiltree County Texas map
36.28° N · 100.82° W · County seat: Perryton · 919 sq mi
Perryton, the seat of Ochiltree County, does not stand where either of the towns that made it stood. In 1919 a railway was surveyed across the top of the Panhandle and two settlements moved to meet it — Ochiltree from a few miles south in Texas and Gray from across the line in Oklahoma — and the merged town has been the wheat and gas capital of the northeastern Panhandle ever since, a few miles below the state line.
Perryton sits close to the top of the county on US-83. The straight line across the top of the map is the Oklahoma border at 36°30′.
Where Ochiltree County is
The county's northern boundary is the Oklahoma state line, with Texas County, Oklahoma to the north and Beaver County, Oklahoma at the northeast corner; neither is linked here. Its Texas neighbours are Lipscomb east, Roberts south and Hansford west.
Amarillo is 93 miles southwest in a straight line and about two hours by road; Lubbock is 196 miles. Liberal, Kansas and Guymon, Oklahoma are both closer to Perryton than any Texas city of any size, which is why Ochiltree County's trade and its high school sports rivalries reach north across the line. The county is level High Plains cut by Wolf Creek in the southeast, with under a square mile of water in 919 square miles. It is on Central Time and in the 13th congressional district.
Perryton and Booker
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Perryton | City · county seat | 8,476 |
| Booker (part) | Town | 20 |
Booker sits on the county line and is nearly all in Lipscomb County — 20 of its 1,433 residents are on the Ochiltree side. Perryton holds about 85 percent of the county's population, one of the highest shares of any county in the Panhandle.
Roads
- US-83 – the main route, north out of Perryton into Oklahoma toward Liberal, Kansas, and south through Canadian to Wheeler and I-40 at Shamrock.
- SH-15 – east–west across the county, west to Spearman and Stratford, east to Follett and the Oklahoma line.
- SH-70 – runs southwest from Perryton toward Pampa and Clarendon.
- Loop 143 – the loop around Perryton; Spur 192 is a short connector at the edge of town.
There is no interstate; I-40 at Shamrock is about 110 road miles south on US-83, and US-54 across the Oklahoma Panhandle is the usual route toward Kansas and Colorado.
Wheat, gas and a town that was moved
Perryton bills itself as the Wheatheart of the Nation, and in June the elevators along the railway take in hard red winter wheat from a radius that crosses two state lines. The other business is gas: the county lies over the Anadarko Basin, and Perryton has been a drilling, service and supply base for the basin's deep wells since the 1950s, with yards full of pipe and workover rigs along the highway. Cattle feeding and the grain to support it fill in the rest.
The moved-town story is not a legend but the reason the map looks as it does. When the North Texas and Santa Fe line came through in 1919, the old county seat of Ochiltree, several miles to the south, had no rail service, and neither did Gray, Oklahoma. Houses and stores from both were jacked up and hauled to the new townsite, which was named for George M. Perry. The county keeps the older name: it was created out of the Bexar district in 1876, organized in 1889, and named for William B. Ochiltree, a Republic of Texas official and legislator. It stayed a dry county long after most of Texas voted wet, and only changed that in recent decades.