Potter County Texas map
35.40° N · 101.89° W · County seat: Amarillo · 922 sq mi
Potter County holds the northern two-thirds of Amarillo and almost nothing else. Of its 118,525 people, 101,603 live inside the city limits; the rest of the county is the Canadian River valley, ranchland, the Cliffside gas field and the state prison units on the west side. It is one of the few square Panhandle counties whose seat is a real city rather than a courthouse town.
Amarillo fills the bottom of the frame and spills across the southern county line into Randall County. The Canadian River crosses the top third.
Where Potter County is
Potter sits at the centre of the Panhandle, about 40 miles south of the Oklahoma line. Moore County is north, Carson east, Armstrong southeast, Randall south, Deaf Smith southwest and Oldham west. With Randall, Armstrong, Carson and Oldham it makes up the Amarillo metropolitan area, the only metro in the top third of Texas.
The land is High Plains caprock at roughly 3,600 feet except where the Canadian River has cut down through it. North of the river the plain resumes and runs on into Moore County. That river valley is the reason the north end of the county looks nothing like the south: mesas, cottonwoods and broken red ground instead of level wheat and grass.
Amarillo and the county line
Amarillo is the county seat, but the city is not contained by the county. Its southern subdivisions cross into Randall County, and the 2020 census counted 101,603 Amarillo residents on the Potter side and nearly as many on the Randall side. The practical effects are ordinary and constant: two sets of county tax offices, two sheriff's departments, two sets of county road crews and a property-tax bill that depends on which side of Hollywood Road a house stands. Growth has run south, so Randall County has passed Potter in population even though the courthouse is here.
The other incorporated place is Bishop Hills, a town of 209 people surrounded by Amarillo's western edge. Everything else in Potter County outside the city is unincorporated: the airport on the east side, the feedyards and grain elevators, the Clements and Neal state prison units northwest of town, and the Cliffside field, whose unusually helium-rich natural gas made Amarillo the centre of the federal helium program.
Roads
- I-40 – straight across the county east–west through Amarillo, following the Route 66 corridor toward Vega and New Mexico in one direction and Groom and Shamrock in the other.
- I-27 – ends here. Its northern terminus is the interchange with I-40 in Amarillo; southbound it runs to Canyon, Tulia, Plainview and Lubbock.
- US-87 / US-287 – the joint north–south route through the city, splitting north of Amarillo for Dumas and the Oklahoma Panhandle.
- US-287 southeast – the main road toward Claude, Childress, Wichita Falls and Fort Worth.
- US-60 – northeast toward Panhandle and Pampa alongside the Santa Fe line.
- SH-136 – northeast from Amarillo to Fritch and Borger, the road to Lake Meredith and Alibates.
- Loop 335 – the ring road, its northern and eastern arms in Potter County.
The Canadian River, Alibates and Lake Meredith
The Canadian is the only through-flowing river in the Panhandle, and it crosses northern Potter County from west to east. Above the south bank, roughly 35 miles north of Amarillo, is Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — the only national monument in Texas. The agatized dolomite there was quarried for something like 13,000 years and traded across the plains; the quarry pits can only be visited on a ranger-guided walk, and the site is reached from SH-136 near Fritch.
The same road leads to Lake Meredith National Recreation Area. The reservoir itself is impounded downstream in Hutchinson and Moore counties, but the recreation area's southwestern arms reach into Potter County along the river. This is the water supply and the boating water for a region that otherwise has neither.
Robert Potter, the county's namesake, was secretary of the navy for the Republic of Texas and signed the Texas Declaration of Independence; he never saw this country, which was Comanche and Kiowa range until the 1870s. The county was created in 1876 out of the Bexar District and organized in 1887, the year the railroad reached the townsite that became Amarillo.