Reagan County Texas map

Reagan sits on the northwestern shoulder of the Edwards Plateau, at the point where the Permian Basin oil counties give way to the ranch country of the Concho Valley. Glasscock County is north, Sterling northeast, Irion and Tom Green east, Crockett south, Upton west and Midland northwest.

It is larger than most counties around it at 1,176 square miles, and it is one of the last Texas counties to be organized — created and organized in 1903, out of Tom Green County, long after its neighbors. The name honors John H. Reagan, postmaster general of the Confederacy and later the first chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that would eventually regulate the oil the county sits on.

San Angelo is 64 miles east on US-67, Midland 54 miles northwest, Odessa 60 miles northwest and Big Spring 61 miles north. There is no interstate; the nearest is I-10, roughly 60 miles south across Crockett County.

Big Lake is the only incorporated place, and nine out of ten county residents live in it. Stiles, north of Big Lake on SH-137, was the original county seat and built itself a courthouse in 1911 — the same year the railroad chose to run through Big Lake instead. The oil boom settled the argument and the county government moved in the 1920s. The Stiles courthouse still stands alone in a pasture and is one of the better-known abandoned courthouses in Texas. Texon, west of Big Lake, was the company town built for the Santa Rita field and is likewise mostly gone.

The big lake the town is named for is a shallow playa a few miles from the townsite that fills after heavy rain and is dry the rest of the time. The 2024 Census estimate puts the county at 3,139, down from 2020.

When Texas set aside public land to endow its university in the nineteenth century, the acres it chose were the ones nobody wanted: dry grazing country scattered across West Texas, worth a few cents an acre in lease income. Reagan County held a block of it. A group of promoters took a lease, drilled for nearly two years on a shoestring, and on 28 May 1923 the well came in.

The field it opened — the Big Lake field, and later the Texon and adjacent developments — put money into the Permanent University Fund for the first time. Under the state constitution the fund's income is divided between the University of Texas System and the Texas A&M University System, which is why two of the largest university endowments in the United States trace back to a wildcat well in a county of 3,000 people. The original wooden derrick was dismantled and part of the rig, along with the wellhead, was moved to the University of Texas campus in Austin, where it stands beside a highway on the east side of the grounds. The well site itself is marked on the county road west of Big Lake.

Production never stopped. The county still runs on oil and gas, now largely from horizontal wells in the Wolfcamp and Spraberry benches that extend south from the Midland Basin, and university lands remain a large share of the mineral acreage. Above ground the land is Edwards Plateau range — mesquite, cedar and grass on limestone, cut by draws feeding the Middle Concho River east toward San Angelo — grazed by cattle, sheep and goats. There is no reservoir and no state park in the county, and rainfall averages around 17 inches a year.