Terry County Texas map
33.17° N · 102.34° W · County seat: Brownfield · 891 sq mi · Central Time
Four U.S. highways converge inside the city limits of Brownfield, which makes a town of under 9,000 people the road hub of the southwestern South Plains. What moves along them is agricultural: Terry County is cotton country that has also become one of the most important wine-grape counties in Texas and one of the larger pumpkin-producing counties in the United States.
Centered on Brownfield. Trace the four highway legs leaving town — northeast to Lubbock, southwest to Seminole, west to Plains, east to Tahoka — and you have the county's whole road system.
Where Terry County is
Terry sits two counties in from the New Mexico line and one county south of the Lubbock–Levelland row. Hockley County is north, Lubbock at the northeast corner, Lynn east and Dawson off the southeast corner. Gaines is south, Yoakum west and Cochran northwest.
Lubbock is 40 miles northeast — about 45 minutes on the four-lane US-62/82. Midland is 83 miles southeast and Odessa 92 miles south, which puts Brownfield within commuting reach of the northern Permian Basin oil field as well as the Lubbock trade area.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Brownfield (county seat) | City | 8,937 |
| Meadow | Town | 596 |
| Wellman | City | 230 |
Roughly three of every four people in the county live in Brownfield. Meadow is on US-62/82 between Brownfield and Lubbock; Wellman is a small incorporated city south of the seat. Everything else on the map is a school, a gin or a crossroads rather than a town. Gomez, west of Brownfield, was the county's first settlement and lost the county-seat election of 1904; it has been a name on the map rather than a town ever since. Tokio, on the highway toward Seminole, is the same kind of survivor.
Roads
- US-62 / US-82 – runs northeast to Lubbock through Meadow, and southwest out of Brownfield toward Seminole and Hobbs, New Mexico.
- US-380 – east to Tahoka in Lynn County, west to Plains in Yoakum County.
- US-385 – north to Levelland, south to Seminole, Andrews and eventually Odessa.
- SH-137 – runs southeast from Brownfield toward Lamesa in Dawson County.
- Section-line farm roads – away from the highways the county is a one-mile grid, and the FM routes out of Brownfield are how the gins and grain elevators are fed.
Cotton, grapes and pumpkins
Terry County farms the same Ogallala water and the same sandy loam as the rest of the South Plains, and cotton is still the acreage crop. What sets it apart is what else it grows on that ground. The Texas High Plains carries most of the state's wine-grape acreage, and Terry County has consistently been at or near the top of the county list — the combination of sandy soil, hot days, cool nights at 3,300 feet and low humidity suits vinifera vines, and grapes grown here are crushed in wineries all over Texas, including the Hill Country.
The county is also one of the leading pumpkin producers in the country. Pumpkins want the same dry autumn that makes cotton harvest possible, and the crop is shipped out of Terry County by the truckload in September and October to markets far outside Texas.
The county square was surveyed in 1876 out of the Bexar District and organized in 1904, and it is named for Benjamin Franklin Terry, the Confederate colonel who raised the cavalry regiment known as Terry's Texas Rangers. Brownfield became the seat at organization and has held it ever since.