Wilbarger County Texas map

The county was created in 1858 out of the Bexar District — the vast unorganised land block from which most of West Texas was eventually cut — and it was not organised until 1881, when the railroad and the cattle trade finally brought enough settlers. It carries the name of the brothers Josiah Pugh and Mathias Wilbarger, early Anglo settlers in Texas. Josiah is remembered mainly for surviving a scalping near the Colorado River in 1833 and living another eleven years afterward, a story retold often enough that it became frontier legend.

The Red River and the Oklahoma line form the north boundary, with Tillman County, Oklahoma across it and Jackson County, Oklahoma at the northwest corner. In Texas the neighbours are Wichita County east, Archer County southeast, Baylor County south, and Hardeman and Foard counties west.

Wichita Falls is 44 miles southeast — the nearest city of any size, and where Wilbarger County goes for hospitals and flights. Fort Worth is 143 miles southeast on US-287 and Abilene 117 miles southwest. Amarillo is roughly 200 miles northwest on the same highway.

Vernon, population 10,087 in 2020, is the only incorporated place in the county and holds close to four fifths of its people. It grew up as a cattle-shipping and trade town on the Fort Worth and Denver line, and the courthouse square and the old business district still sit a few blocks off the modern US-287 bypass. Vernon College, a public community college, serves the county and the surrounding ranch country from a campus on the south side. The singer Roy Orbison was born in Vernon in 1936, before his family moved west to the Permian Basin.

The county has lost population slowly for decades — the 2024 Census estimate of 12,455 is below the 2020 count of 12,887 — which is the usual pattern for a ranching county with one town and no interstate.

Daniel Waggoner and his son W. T. Waggoner built up their holdings from the 1850s onward, and by the early twentieth century the W. T. Waggoner Estate covered roughly 510,000 acres spread across Wilbarger, Baylor, Foard, Knox, Archer and Wichita counties, held together as a single fenced property. Its Three D brand — the reversed triple D — is one of the oldest continuously used marks in Texas. Oil was found under the ranch while the family was drilling for stock water, and cattle and petroleum have run side by side on it ever since.

The estate was held in an undivided trust for most of a century, which is why it was never broken up the way most big Texas ranches were. It was put on the market as a single lot and sold in 2016 to Stan Kroenke — the first change of ownership in the ranch's history. The headquarters and the main horse operation lie south of Vernon, and much of what a driver sees from US-183 between Vernon and Seymour is ranch land.

The Pease River enters from Hardeman County and runs east across the northwest of the county to meet the Red River near the Wichita County line. Like the Red, it carries a heavy load of salt and gypsum picked up from the beds it drains, so the water is too brackish for most uses and the county depends on wells and on reservoirs outside its borders. Only 7 of the county's 978 square miles are water, one of the lower shares in North Texas.

The land between the rivers is rolling short-grass and mesquite prairie broken by breaks along the watercourses — cattle country first, with wheat and cotton on the flatter ground north and west of Vernon. Copper Breaks State Park, in the same rough Pease River country, lies just west in Hardeman County.