Palo Pinto County Texas map
32.75° N · 98.32° W · County seat: Palo Pinto · 986 sq mi
The Brazos River enters Palo Pinto County from the northwest, is stopped by Morris Sheppard Dam to make Possum Kingdom Lake, then cuts a walled canyon south through broken limestone hills. This is where the flat prairie west of Fort Worth ends and the country starts standing on edge — the Palo Pinto Mountains are only a few hundred feet of relief, but they are the most vertical thing for a long way in any direction.
Centered on the village of Palo Pinto. The branching water in the northwest is Possum Kingdom Lake; I-20 clips the southern edge through Gordon and Mingus.
Where Palo Pinto County is
Seven counties touch it: Jack north, Parker east, Hood southeast, Erath south, Eastland southwest, Stephens west and Young northwest. Fort Worth is about 57 miles east in a straight line — under an hour and a half on I-20 or US-180 — and Wichita Falls is 81 miles northwest.
The seat, Palo Pinto, is one of the smallest county seats in the state: an unincorporated village on US-180 with the courthouse, a jail museum and little else. The county's population lives mostly at Mineral Wells, a dozen miles east on the same highway, which holds roughly half of the 28,409 people counted in 2020. The name is Spanish for "painted stick" and came from Palo Pinto Creek before it was applied to the county in 1856.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Mineral Wells (part) | City | 14,655 |
| Graford | City | 672 |
| Strawn | City | 542 |
| Gordon | City | 468 |
| Mingus | City | 227 |
Mineral Wells extends east into Parker County; the figure above is the Palo Pinto share. Palo Pinto, the county seat, is unincorporated and has no census population of its own.
Roads
- I-20 – crosses the southern tip through Gordon and Mingus, between Weatherford and Ranger.
- US-180 – the main road, east–west through Mineral Wells, Palo Pinto and on to Breckenridge.
- US-281 – north–south through Mineral Wells, toward Jacksboro one way and Stephenville the other.
- SH-16 – north from Strawn and Gordon through Palo Pinto to Graford and Possum Kingdom, then on to Graham.
- SH-254 – the Possum Kingdom road, west from Graford to the dam and the west shore.
- SH-337, SH-193 and SH-108 – farm-country links to Strawn, Santo and Gordon.
- Loop 397 and Loop 533 – short state loops serving the towns.
Possum Kingdom Lake and the Brazos canyon
Possum Kingdom is a Brazos River Authority reservoir behind Morris Sheppard Dam, finished in the 1940s and shaped like a set of fingers reaching into side canyons. Its water is clear and deep by Texas standards because it sits in rock rather than clay, and the cliffs at Hell's Gate — twin bluffs where the lake narrows — are the landmark everyone photographs. Possum Kingdom State Park is on the eastern shore off Park Road 33, reached from SH-16 at Caddo or Graford.
Below the dam the river runs on through a shallow, rock-bottomed canyon before it leaves the county to the southeast, and that stretch is one of the better paddling and fishing runs in North Texas. The county's 33 square miles of water are almost all lake.
Mineral Wells and the Baker Hotel
Mineral Wells grew up around water wells whose mineral content was sold as a cure from the 1880s onward — "Crazy Water," named for the pavilion at the Crazy Well. The Baker Hotel, a 14-storey brick tower finished in 1929, was built to house the people who came to drink it. The resort trade collapsed, the Baker closed in 1972, and the empty building stood over the town for decades as its most conspicuous landmark; restoration work has been under way in recent years. Fort Wolters, on the east side of town, trained most of the U.S. Army's helicopter pilots during the Vietnam War and is now an industrial park and Texas National Guard site.
Palo Pinto Mountains State Park
Texas Parks and Wildlife's newest state park sits in the southwest of the county, south of Strawn off SH-16, built around Tucker Lake in the rough hills that give the county its skyline. It opened to visitors in 2024 after more than a decade of land acquisition and trail building, and it is the first new state park in this part of Texas in a long time — a second reason, alongside Possum Kingdom, that a county of 28,000 people sees far more weekend traffic than its population suggests.