Winkler County Texas map
31.83° N · 103.06° W · County seat: Kermit · 841 sq mi
Winkler County had fewer than 100 residents before 1926. Then the Hendrick field came in west of Wink and the county became one of the loudest oil booms in Texas history. Two towns are left from it — Kermit and Wink — along with the Wink Sinks, a pair of collapse craters that opened over the old field.
Kermit sits at the junction of SH-18, SH-115 and SH-302 near the center. Wink is 10 miles southwest, and the New Mexico line runs along the northwest corner.
Where Winkler County is
Winkler County was created from the Tom Green District in 1887 and not organized until 1910, taking its name from Clinton McKamy Winkler, an appeals court judge, state representative and Confederate colonel. Its northwestern corner meets Lea County, New Mexico, which keeps Mountain Time while Winkler County stays on Central.
The Texas neighbors, clockwise from northeast, are Andrews, Ector to the east, Ward south and Loving west. Odessa is 40 miles east and Midland 58 miles northeast; Alpine is 108 miles southwest and Lubbock 139 miles northeast.
No interstate enters the county. I-20 passes about 20 miles south through Monahans, and every trip out of Kermit begins on a state highway.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Kermit (county seat) | City | 6,268 |
| Wink | City | 920 |
Kermit was named for Kermit Roosevelt, a son of Theodore Roosevelt who spent time in the area, and was a ranch supply point long before the oil arrived. Wink is a boomtown pure and simple, laid out in 1926 and named as a short form of the county. The two together hold 7,188 of the county's 7,791 people; a small remainder lives in the town of Monahans, most of which is in Ward County, and on the ranches in between.
Roads
- SH-18 – the north–south route: south from Kermit through Wink to Monahans and I-20, north across the New Mexico line toward Jal.
- SH-115 – northeast from Kermit toward Andrews and the Texas–New Mexico oilfield; southeast toward Wickett.
- SH-302 – the main east–west road, running from Kermit east to Odessa and west across Loving County to Pecos in Reeves County.
The Hendrick field and the Wink Sinks
In July 1926 the Hendrick No. 1 well came in on ranch land southwest of the future site of Wink and opened a field that pulled tens of thousands of people into a county that had almost none. Wink grew to several thousand residents within a year or two, complete with a railroad spur, a boom-era main street and a reputation for disorder; when the shallow wells declined in the 1930s, most of the population left again.
The field left something behind. In June 1980 the ground gave way above an old well bore northeast of Wink, producing a water-filled crater more than 300 feet across. A second sink opened about a mile away in 2002 and has kept growing. Geologists tie both to the dissolution of Permian salt beds around abandoned well bores, and the two Wink Sinks are now monitored by satellite radar as a study case for subsidence over old oilfields.
Wink, Roy Orbison and the sandhills
Roy Orbison moved to Wink as a boy in the 1940s and grew up there, and the town keeps a small museum of his early years in the old school building. Wink's school teams are still called the Wildcats, and the town's population of 920 is a fraction of its boom peak.
Along the southern county line, the dune field of Monahans Sandhills State Park extends out of Ward County into Winkler. The rest of the county is flat, sandy grassland with pumpjacks on it. In April, May and June the highest daily maximum temperatures in the continental United States are frequently recorded in this low, dry corner of the Permian Basin.