Wheeler County Texas map
35.39° N · 100.25° W · County seat: Wheeler · 916 sq mi
Wheeler County was the first county organized in the Texas Panhandle, in 1879, and for years it was the whole region's courthouse: the surrounding unorganized counties were attached to it for judicial business. That history sits at Mobeetie, the oldest town on the High Plains, next to the ruins of Fort Elliott. The county's east line is the 100th meridian and the Oklahoma border.
The straight right-hand edge of the frame is the Oklahoma state line. I-40 clips the southeast corner through Shamrock.
Where Wheeler County is
Wheeler is in the southeast corner of the Panhandle, against the Oklahoma line. Roger Mills County, Oklahoma is northeast and Beckham County, Oklahoma east; on the Texas side it borders Hemphill north, Collingsworth south, Donley southwest, Gray west and Roberts northwest.
Amarillo is about 90 miles west on I-40 and Wichita Falls about 143 miles southeast, but Oklahoma City is the closer metropolitan pull for the eastern half of the county. The land here has already dropped off the Llano Estacado: this is rolling red country drained by the North Fork of the Red River and Sweetwater Creek, with mesquite and shinnery oak instead of unbroken plain.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Shamrock | City | 1,793 |
| Wheeler | City · county seat | 1,487 |
| Mobeetie | City | 87 |
Shamrock is the largest town but has never been the county seat. Mobeetie, which was, now has fewer than a hundred residents.
Roads
- I-40 – crosses the southeastern corner through Shamrock, running east into Oklahoma toward Elk City and west toward McLean, Groom and Amarillo along the Route 66 corridor.
- US-83 – the north–south route, entering from Canadian in Hemphill County, passing through the town of Wheeler and meeting I-40 at Shamrock before continuing south to Wellington.
- SH-152 – the east–west county road through Mobeetie and Wheeler, running west toward Pampa in Gray County.
- US-83 Business / old US-66 – the pre-interstate main streets in Shamrock, still lined with the buildings that served the highway.
Mobeetie and Fort Elliott
The U.S. Army built Fort Elliott on Sweetwater Creek in 1875, at the end of the Red River War, to keep the southern plains tribes on the reservations and to protect the buffalo hunters. A supply settlement grew up beside it, first called Sweetwater and then Mobeetie, and it became the commercial capital of the Panhandle before there were any others — a cattle-trade town with a district court where Temple Houston, Sam Houston's youngest son, served as district attorney. The fort closed in 1890 and a tornado wrecked the town in 1898. When the railroad went through Shamrock and Wheeler instead, the county seat moved to Wheeler in 1907. Old Mobeetie keeps the 1886 county jail as a museum on the townsite.
Shamrock, Route 66 and gas
Shamrock was laid out on the Rock Island railroad and then caught US Route 66, which crossed US-83 in the middle of town. The Tower Station and U-Drop Inn, built in 1936 at that crossing, is the best-known art deco building on the Texas stretch of the old road: a sheet-metal spire over a filling station and café, restored and now serving as the town's visitor centre and museum, and used as the model for the body shop in the animated film Cars. Shamrock also keeps a fragment of the Blarney Stone in Elmore Park and runs a St. Patrick's Day celebration each March.
Underneath all of this is the western end of the Anadarko Basin. Deep natural gas wells have been drilled across Wheeler County since the mid-twentieth century, and gas and oil royalties, along with cattle and wheat, are what keep a county of fewer than 5,000 people in business. Traffic on I-40 does the rest: Shamrock is the first Texas exit town for westbound drivers coming out of Oklahoma.