Oldham County Texas map
35.40° N · 102.60° W · County seat: Vega · 1,502 sq mi
Oldham County is the last stretch of Texas on Interstate 40 before New Mexico: 1,502 square miles holding 1,758 people and two small towns. Vega and Adrian both sit on the old Route 66 alignment, and the county's northern third falls off the caprock into the Canadian River breaks, where the cow town of Tascosa stood before the county seat moved south to the plains.
The straight western edge of the frame is the New Mexico line at 103° W. I-40 crosses the lower third; the Canadian River cuts the top.
Where Oldham County is
Oldham sits on the western edge of the Panhandle, its whole west side pressed against Quay County, New Mexico. Hartley County is north, Moore northeast, Potter east, Randall southeast and Deaf Smith south. Amarillo is about 45 miles southeast, and Oldham is counted in the Amarillo metropolitan area even though it has no town of a thousand people. Lubbock is 133 miles southeast.
The county is not flat all the way across, which makes it unusual for this part of the Panhandle. The southern strip, including Vega, sits on top of the Llano Estacado. North of that the land slopes down about a dozen miles to the Canadian River, then climbs back to the High Plains a few miles inside Hartley County. That broken middle country is grassland and ranch, not farmland.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Vega | City · county seat | 876 |
| Adrian | City | 129 |
Those are the only two incorporated places in the county. Wildorado, in the southeast corner on I-40, and Boys Ranch, on the river, are unincorporated.
Roads
- I-40 – enters from Potter County near Wildorado and runs west through Vega and Adrian to the New Mexico line, following the Route 66 corridor. Most of the old highway survives as the frontage road and as the main street of both towns.
- US-385 – the north–south road, crossing I-40 at Vega, running north to Channing and Dalhart and south to Hereford.
- FM 1061 – north from Vega toward the Canadian River crossing and Boys Ranch.
Adrian's claim on the map is the midpoint of Route 66: the marker there puts Chicago and Los Angeles at 1,139 miles apiece. Vega's is the interstate junction — it is the only fuel and food stop between Amarillo and Tucumcari, New Mexico that sits on a crossing highway. East of Vega the turbines of the Wildorado wind farm stand along the interstate, one of the first large wind projects built in the Panhandle.
Tascosa, the XIT and Boys Ranch
Before the railroads, the county's business was on the Canadian River. Tascosa grew up at a shallow crossing in the late 1870s and served the LS, LIT and LX ranches; it was the county seat from the 1880s and had a stone courthouse built in 1884. The Fort Worth and Denver line missed it, the ranching economy changed, and the seat was moved to Vega, on the railroad and later on Route 66. Tascosa emptied out; its Boot Hill cemetery is still on the hillside.
The three-million-acre XIT Ranch — the land the state traded for the construction of the capitol in Austin — took in part of Oldham County along with nine other Panhandle counties, and its fences shaped the section lines you can still see from the air. In 1939 the old Tascosa townsite became Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, a residential school for children that still operates there; the 1884 courthouse stands on the grounds as a museum.
Ranching is still what the county does. Cattle graze the breaks and the shortgrass, irrigated circles appear only on the southern tableland, and the population has not passed 2,500 in any census since the ranch era ended.