County History

Cochran County lies on the western South Plains, within the great geographical region known as the Llano Estacado. The Llano stretches across portions of northwest Texas and eastern New Mexico and forms the southern extension of the High Plains of North America.

The landscape is remarkably level. Cochran County lies at elevations generally ranging from approximately 3,500 to 3,800 feet above sea level. Sandy and loamy soils predominate across broad stretches of prairie historically covered with grasses, mesquite, and other vegetation adapted to the semiarid climate.

The apparent flatness of the landscape can conceal subtle but important variations. Shallow depressions collect rainfall and form the playas characteristic of the High Plains. Surface water is limited and often temporary, making dependable sources of water especially important throughout every period of the county's history.

Among the county's best-known natural landmarks is Silver Lake, a saline lake in the northeastern portion of the county. Early Spanish explorers knew the lake as Laguna Quemado.

Water scarcity would become one of the defining forces in Cochran County history. It influenced the movement of Native peoples, discouraged early permanent settlement, determined ranch headquarters and camps, affected railroad development, contributed to the decline of some communities, and eventually made the underground Ogallala Aquifer central to the county's agricultural economy.

The Llano Estacado was once commonly portrayed by outsiders as an empty, barren, or nearly unusable region. In reality, it was an ecological system well suited to grass, grazing animals, and mobile human communities. Bison, pronghorn antelope, coyotes, jackrabbits, and other wildlife occupied the plains long before cattle and farms transformed the landscape.

The Earliest Known People

The land that became Cochran County was occupied and used by humans thousands of years before the county itself existed. Archaeological evidence cited for Cochran County indicates that Native people hunted in this area between approximately 5,000 and 10,000 years ago.

Across the greater High Plains, human occupation reaches still farther into the Paleoindian era. The economy of these early peoples was closely connected to the animals and seasonal resources of the plains. As environmental conditions and animal populations changed, later generations increasingly relied on bison and other Plains resources.

Permanent agricultural villages were much more difficult to maintain on the western South Plains than along dependable rivers elsewhere in Texas. That did not make the region unoccupied. Instead, the Llano Estacado functioned as an enormous hunting, travel, trade, and seasonal-use landscape.

The Horse Changes the Plains

By the seventeenth century, Kiowa and Apache peoples hunted and traveled through the region. The introduction of the horse, acquired ultimately through contact with the Spanish world, transformed life throughout the Plains.

Horses increased mobility, made bison hunting more efficient, expanded trade networks, and allowed mounted peoples to travel and raid across enormous distances.

During the eighteenth century the Comanches moved onto the South Plains and displaced Apache groups from much of the region. The Quahadi, or Antelope, division of the Comanches became particularly associated with the western Llano Estacado.

For generations, the land that would become Cochran County lay within the broader world commonly called Comanchería. Spanish and later Mexican governments might claim the country on maps, but the practical balance of power on the plains rested largely with Native peoples, especially the Comanches.

Spanish Explorers

The first European expeditions into the greater Llano Estacado occurred during the Spanish colonial period. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado crossed portions of the plains in 1541 while searching for the legendary wealth of Quivira.

Coronado described an immense and nearly featureless landscape where travelers could lose their bearings because there were so few obvious landmarks. The precise route of his expedition across the Llano remains the subject of historical debate, and claims that Coronado personally crossed a particular modern county should therefore be treated cautiously.

Silver Lake nevertheless preserves a direct connection with the Spanish era through the name Laguna Quemado, by which the saline lake was known to early Spanish explorers.

The Comanchero Trade

The western plains were also connected economically to New Mexico. Traders later known as Comancheros traveled from northern and central New Mexico onto the Llano Estacado to trade with Comanches and other Plains peoples.

These traders exchanged manufactured goods, foodstuffs, cloth, tools, and other products for livestock and commodities obtained on the plains. Over time, Comanchero routes created trails through a region that Anglo-American maps often still represented as largely unknown.

Some of those routes would later be followed or adapted by ranchers, soldiers, freighters, and settlers.

The End of the Free Plains

Political authority over Texas changed repeatedly during the nineteenth century: Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, Texas became an independent republic in 1836, and Texas entered the United States in 1845.

Those changes had comparatively little immediate effect on the western South Plains. There were almost no permanent Anglo-American communities in what became Cochran County, and the region remained overwhelmingly a Native-controlled hunting and trading country.

That situation changed decisively during the 1870s. United States military campaigns against the Comanches and their allies, together with the destruction of the great southern bison herds by commercial hunters, brought the traditional Plains order to an end.

By the middle and late 1870s, the Llano Estacado was entering a new period. The grasslands that had supported bison and Native hunting cultures were soon claimed by enormous cattle operations.

On August 21, 1876, the Texas Legislature created Cochran County during a period in which much of sparsely settled western Texas was being divided into the county boundaries that remain familiar today.

The territory had previously been associated administratively with the vast Bexar and Young districts. Creating Cochran County, however, did not immediately create a functioning county government.

There were simply too few permanent residents.

Robert E. Cochran

The county was named in honor of Robert E. Cochran, an Alamo defender.

Cochran was born in 1810 and came to Texas in 1835. He participated in the siege of Bexar and later served in Captain William R. Carey's artillery company in the Alamo garrison.

Robert Cochran died with the other defenders of the Alamo on March 6, 1836.

Four decades later, his name was given to a county he had never seen and which, at the time of its creation, contained almost no permanent population.

A County Existing Mostly on Paper

Cochran County remained unorganized for nearly forty-eight years.

During this long period there was no independent Cochran County commissioners court, sheriff's office, courthouse, county clerk's office, or other local governmental structure. Judicial and administrative responsibilities were handled through neighboring counties.

The county therefore existed legally long before it existed as a functioning political community.

Texas Rangers at Silver Lake

Even after Cochran County had been created, much of the western Llano Estacado remained unfamiliar country to outsiders.

In 1880 a Texas Ranger detachment commanded by George W. Arrington stopped at Silver Lake while traveling from Yellow House Canyon toward New Mexico in search of the legendary “Lost Lakes.”

The expedition illustrates how uncertain the geography of the South Plains could still seem only four years after Cochran County appeared on the map.

The XIT Ranch

The first great economic transformation of the county came through cattle.

In 1879 and 1880 the Texas Capitol Reservation was surveyed as part of the state's plan to finance construction of a new Capitol building in Austin. Title to approximately three million acres eventually passed to the interests that developed the enormous XIT Ranch.

The XIT extended for roughly 220 miles along the New Mexico side of the Texas Panhandle and South Plains. It encompassed land in ten Texas counties, including Cochran County.

In 1887 XIT manager A. G. Boyce divided the ranch into seven major divisions. Cochran County formed part of the southernmost division, known as Las Casas Amarillas — the Yellow Houses division.

The Yellow Houses division served principally as breeding range for the XIT cattle operation.

Ranching required a different infrastructure than farming. Headquarters, wells, windmills, line camps, fences, cowboys, horses, supply points, and cattle trails could cover an enormous territory while supporting only a tiny permanent population.

The federal census of 1890 recorded no residents in Cochran County. By 1900, only 25 people were counted.

C. C. Slaughter and the Lazy S

Another cattle empire soon became even more closely associated with Cochran County.

Around 1898, Christopher Columbus “C. C.” Slaughter acquired approximately 246,000 acres in Cochran and neighboring Hockley County.

Slaughter's first local ranch headquarters was established near the future Lehman area. About a year later the headquarters was moved to a location approximately two miles southwest of what later became Morton.

Slaughter became one of the most prominent cattlemen in Texas. Although cattle dominated his career, he also recognized that the South Plains might eventually become farming country.

George W. Littlefield

Another legendary Texas cattleman, George Washington Littlefield, purchased more than 235,000 acres of former XIT lands around the turn of the twentieth century, including land extending into Cochran County.

The XIT, Slaughter, Littlefield, and other ranching interests shaped the earliest Anglo-American economy of the county.

The landscape was divided into enormous grazing holdings rather than the checkerboard of farms and county roads familiar to later generations.

The Earliest Post Offices

Permanent community life developed very slowly during the early twentieth century.

A post office operated at Mexline from 1903 until 1905. Another was established at Edwards in 1905. Edwards was named for Edward P. Kirkland, an early storekeeper who served as postmaster.

The Edwards post office remained in operation until 1913. During periods when no local post office served the county, residents sometimes received mail through Bronco in neighboring Yoakum County.

Ranch Schools

Schools appeared before most of the county's towns.

Ranch headquarters sometimes contained only a handful of families, but those families still needed to educate their children. The result was a collection of tiny ranch schools, sometimes with only one or two pupils.

At the Bar-X-Bar Ranch west of the future Morton townsite, Margaret Collins was hired in 1905 to teach the two Bird children. Other early schools were associated with ranches including the Surrat, Ellington, and Westheimer-Daube operations.

The school at the Westheimer-Daube Ranch became known as the Shipman School because Clint Shipman, son of ranch foreman Lem Shipman, was its only pupil. Lessye Jones taught the Shipman School during the 1923–1924 school year.

These schools reveal how early institutions developed in Cochran County: not around established towns, but wherever a few families happened to be concentrated.

A Nearly Empty County

Population growth remained extremely slow.

The county had approximately 75 residents in 1910 and only 67 in 1920. As late as 1920, only fourteen farms and ranches were recorded.

Then the enormous ranch holdings began to break apart.

The Breakup of the Slaughter Lands

C. C. Slaughter died in 1919. In 1921 his heirs dissolved the Slaughter Cattle Company and began dividing and selling portions of its extensive South Plains holdings.

Slaughter's eldest daughter, Minnie Slaughter Veal, controlled land in the northern portion of what would become the Morton area.

Her selling agent was Morton J. Smith, a former cowboy, rancher, businessman, and land promoter.

Smith began promoting the land to farmers. Instead of thousands of acres controlled by a single ranching operation, tracts could now be purchased by individual families who intended to establish farms and permanent homes.

Underground Water Changes the Future

The agricultural potential of Cochran County depended upon a resource hidden underground.

Rainfall on the western South Plains was too inconsistent for dependable intensive agriculture. Settlers, however, discovered that wells could reach groundwater beneath the Plains.

That groundwater, part of the southern Ogallala Aquifer system, made a farming future possible.

The transformation was dramatic. By 1925 Cochran County contained 56 farms and ranches. By 1930 there were 285.

During the same decade, population increased from only 67 people in 1920 to 1,963 in 1930.

Modern Cochran County was beginning to take shape.

Morton J. Smith Creates a Town

The movement to organize Cochran County became inseparable from a struggle over where the future courthouse would stand.

Morton J. Smith selected a townsite in 1922 on land he was promoting for Minnie Slaughter Veal. In 1923 Smith and Lee Secrest formally staked out a 704-acre townsite.

Smith named the new settlement Morton, after himself, and intended from the beginning that it become the future county seat.

He donated the public square, streets, and alleys and built a small land office on the east side of the square.

The Slaughters Establish Ligon

The Slaughter interests had a competing plan.

C. C. Slaughter Jr. established Ligon approximately four miles south of Morton. The community was named for Mrs. E. Dick Ligon Slaughter and was surveyed and platted in 1923.

Ligon quickly acquired a general store, gasoline station, and school. It became one of the county's earliest true town settlements.

Both factions understood what selection as county seat could mean. The courthouse would bring government offices, legal business, visitors, land transactions, road development, and commercial activity. Winning the courthouse could determine which town survived.

The 1923 Election

A petition requesting organization of Cochran County was presented to officials in Hockley County in February 1923.

An election followed on March 17, 1923. Morton received 52 votes and Ligon received 13.

The Slaughter faction challenged the election, arguing that some voters were not legally qualified. An injunction prevented the results from becoming final, and organization of the county was delayed.

The Successful Election of 1924

Morton J. Smith tried again.

A second petition eventually obtained enough valid signatures, and Hockley County Judge John H. Doyle ordered another election for May 6, 1924.

Morton won decisively.

The Handbook of Texas records the county-seat vote as 79 for Morton and 20 for Ligon. Local records and later historical accounts contain some variation in the reported Morton total, but all surviving accounts agree that Morton clearly won the second election and was selected county seat.

On May 6, 1924, Cochran County was formally organized almost forty-eight years after the Legislature had created it.

The First County Officials

The first elected county officers included Richard T. Campbell as county judge, Presley Barrett Penney as sheriff, Rupert McCasland as county and district clerk, Lee Cooper as tax assessor, and Maude M. Jones as county treasurer.

Commissioners were also elected to represent the county's four newly established precincts.

The First Commissioners Court

The first meeting of the Cochran County Commissioners Court took place on May 7, 1924, at Winder's General Store on the southwest corner of the Morton square.

The store served as a temporary courthouse.

According to local history, after Judge Campbell completed his oath of office, Morton J. Smith punctuated the occasion with a resounding:

The Dispute Continues

The May election did not immediately end the Morton-Ligon political conflict.

Disputes over the legality of county government and later elections continued into 1925. At one stage competing factions claimed authority to govern Cochran County.

In January 1925 rival officials occupied the temporary courthouse. Some participants were armed, and a Texas Ranger was present to prevent the confrontation from becoming violent.

For several days, Cochran County effectively had two competing county governments.

County officials feared that public records might be seized and removed to Ligon, and guards were posted to protect them. Eventually the governmental faction recognized by state authority prevailed.

Building the Courthouse

County leaders moved quickly to construct a permanent courthouse and jail in Morton.

Architect W. R. Kaufman prepared the plans. Construction was initially connected with W. M. Rice Construction Company, but legal challenges and the death of contractor W. M. Rice complicated the project.

A temporary restraining order halted construction for a time. After the Rice estate was settled and a compromise reached for work already performed, the county awarded a new contract to Sampson Construction Company on August 15, 1925.

The new contract totaled approximately $73,000. The E. L. Steck Company received a separate contract to furnish and equip the courthouse and jail.

On April 24, 1926, the Cochran County Commissioners Court inspected and formally accepted the completed courthouse.

The original building was constructed primarily of red brick and limestone.

In 1968, the courthouse was extensively remodeled and enlarged. Orange brick, aluminum panels, glass, and other modern materials dramatically changed the building's appearance, creating the courthouse recognizable today.

Even as Morton secured the courthouse, another force was determining the future of Cochran County communities: the railroad.

In 1925 the South Plains and Santa Fe Railway, part of the Santa Fe system, constructed a line westward from Lubbock through Cochran County.

The arrival of the tracks created or reshaped several communities almost immediately.

Ironically, the railroad bypassed Morton.

For many newly established Plains towns, being bypassed by a railroad could be fatal. Morton's courthouse, county offices, businesses, roads, and later highway connections gave it an economic foundation independent of the tracks and ultimately allowed it to become the county's dominant community.

Whiteface

The name Whiteface came from C. C. Slaughter's Whiteface Camp and Whiteface Pasture, themselves named for the white-faced cattle associated with the Slaughter ranch.

Ira P. DeLoach laid out an early Whiteface townsite in 1924. When the route of the railroad became clear, however, the community was moved several miles southwest to the tracks in 1925.

J. C. Whaley donated land at the new location. A dependable well there was useful to the railroad, and a depot, railroad structures, homes, and businesses followed.

A post office opened on December 15, 1925. Schools also developed quickly, and a paved road connecting Whiteface and Levelland in 1928 strengthened the community.

Whiteface later became closely associated with both agriculture and petroleum development.

Bledsoe

At the western end of the railroad line, approximately a mile and a half from New Mexico, the railroad established Bledsoe.

The town was named for Santa Fe official Samuel T. Bledsoe.

The first scheduled train from Lubbock arrived on December 1, 1925.

Bledsoe became a major cattle-shipping point almost immediately. Its first school opened in November 1925, and the Cochran County News, the county's first newspaper, was printed there.

By 1929 Bledsoe had approximately 400 residents. Businesses and institutions included several stores, four filling stations, three lumberyards, two hotels, a church, café, electric plant, ice plant, barbershop, movie theater, and dance hall.

Its prospects were limited by inadequate local water and by the railroad's failure to extend westward into New Mexico. By 1936 its population had declined to approximately 150.

Ligon Becomes Lehman

The railroad passed approximately four miles south of Ligon.

Rather than remain isolated from the tracks, residents moved the town south to the railroad and renamed it Lehman, honoring railroad general manager Frank A. Lehman.

The community's school was moved as well, and a new brick school was constructed. The depot became an important cattle-shipping point.

In 1945 the federal government purchased former Slaughter ranch land in the Lehman area, subdivided it, and sold farms to 29 veterans through long-term financing.

Lehman later developed an important connection with Cochran County's petroleum industry.

Chipley, Oasis, and Griffith

Not every proposed town became permanent.

Henry D. Chipley, an associate of Morton J. Smith, attempted to establish a town called Chipley in eastern Cochran County, but the settlement failed to develop as anticipated.

In 1934 Chipley established another community in northwestern Cochran County called Oasis.

Oasis was renamed Griffith in 1950 in honor of banker and landowner Karl Griffith, who constructed a grain elevator there.

At various times Griffith included a cotton gin, store, filling station, grain elevator, and residences.

County Line

County Line developed in northeastern Cochran County near the Hockley County boundary.

Community life developed around a Union Sunday School established in 1935. County Line Baptist Church was organized in 1945.

By the 1960s the settlement included a gin, store, church, and several homes.

A Landscape of Small Communities

Old maps preserve many names that have since disappeared or become little more than geographical references: Mexline, Edwards, Chipley, Ligon, Oasis, Griffith, County Line, and numerous ranch, school, and farming communities.

Their existence reflects a time when rural residents traveled shorter distances for school, church, shopping, mail, fuel, agricultural services, and social gatherings.

Cochran County once contained far more distinct centers of community life than are visible on a modern highway map.

Farming Becomes the County's Foundation

The arrival of farmers during the 1920s transformed not only the population of Cochran County but the physical appearance of the land.

Open range gave way to surveyed farms, section-line roads, fences, houses, wells, windmills, barns, schools, churches, cotton gins, grain facilities, and small businesses.

By 1930 Cochran County contained 285 farms and ranches. Grain sorghum and cotton became increasingly important crops.

The Great Depression

The national economic collapse that began in 1929 struck families who had only recently purchased land, established businesses, or borrowed money to build farms.

Falling commodity prices made it difficult to repay debts or earn enough from crops and livestock to support a family.

Economic hardship was soon compounded by drought.

The Dust Bowl

During the 1930s prolonged drought, powerful winds, exposed soil, and agricultural disturbance created the conditions remembered as the Dust Bowl.

Cochran County experienced some exceptionally severe blowing sand. Historical accounts reported newly formed dunes as high as twenty-eight feet.

Dust could penetrate houses through doors and windows. Sand could cover roads, bury fences, damage buildings, injure crops, and threaten livestock.

Families who had come west believing they were establishing permanent farms suddenly confronted years in which the land itself seemed capable of moving.

Agriculture Survives

One of the most important parts of the Cochran County Dust Bowl story is that agriculture did not simply collapse.

The number of farms actually increased from 285 in 1930 to 431 by 1940.

Harvested cropland expanded from approximately 28,045 acres in 1929 to more than 90,500 acres in 1940.

Cotton acreage increased from approximately 5,300 acres in 1929 to nearly 24,500 acres by 1940.

Sorghum became equally important, occupying more than 52,000 acres by 1940.

The county emerged from the Depression not as a failed settlement experiment, but as an established farming region.

Conservation

The destructive effects of wind erosion encouraged new attention to soil conservation throughout the South Plains.

During the early 1940s a Civilian Conservation Corps presence in the Morton area contributed to efforts aimed at controlling wind and water erosion, improving farm and pasture land, constructing fences, and planting vegetation.

The lessons of the Dust Bowl permanently influenced agricultural practice across the High Plains.

The Search for Oil

Petroleum prospectors had shown interest in the western South Plains by the late 1920s, but the Great Depression slowed exploration.

Serious exploration resumed during the middle 1930s.

Duggan No. 1-A

In 1936 Cascade Petroleum Company, Devonian Oil Company, and Honolulu Oil Corporation entered a joint drilling venture on acreage in Cochran County south of Whiteface.

Their Duggan et al. No. 1-A was drilled into the San Andres formation.

The well reached a total depth of approximately 5,098 feet and was completed on October 29, 1936.

After being plugged back to approximately 5,068 feet, it tested at roughly 396 barrels of oil per day.

It was the first producing oil well in Cochran County and marked the beginning of an industry that would become an important part of the local economy.

Development Begins Slowly

The discovery did not immediately produce a massive drilling boom. There was no convenient pipeline available to carry crude oil from the field.

Producers initially had to haul their oil by truck to other facilities, limiting the economic incentive for rapid drilling.

Pipelines eventually reached the region, removing one of the major obstacles to development.

The Duggan and Slaughter Areas Become One Field

Early production in Cochran County was known as the Duggan field. A producing area farther east in Hockley County was called the Slaughter field.

Continued drilling demonstrated that the two producing areas were associated with the same reservoir system.

On December 1, 1940, the Railroad Commission of Texas combined the Duggan and Slaughter producing areas under a single field designation: Slaughter Field.

The field ultimately covered approximately 100,000 acres in portions of Cochran, Hockley, and Terry counties.

This distinction is important. Cochran County was part of a major producing field, but the Slaughter Field was a multi-county petroleum field and should not be treated as though its entire production belonged to Cochran County.

A Major Texas Oil Field

The Slaughter Field itself became historically significant within the Texas petroleum industry.

By 1941 the field contained approximately 57,014 proved acres. According to the Handbook of Texas, that acreage made the Slaughter Field the second-largest oil-producing area in Texas at that time.

That ranking applies to the entire Slaughter Field across Cochran, Hockley, and Terry counties — not to Cochran County alone.

Cochran County Production

Cochran County itself produced approximately 95,458 barrels of oil in 1938.

The oil industry expanded substantially during World War II. County production reached approximately 5,087,237 barrels in 1944.

Oil wells, pumping equipment, pipelines, service businesses, petroleum workers, and related facilities added a new economic component to a county previously dominated by agriculture and ranching.

Slaughter Field Peak Production

Across the entire Slaughter Field, production rose dramatically during the war years.

The field produced approximately 4.8 million barrels in 1941, more than 7.5 million in 1942, and more than 11.2 million in 1943.

Production peaked in 1945, when approximately 23.8 million barrels were produced from 1,893 wells across the entire multi-county field.

Oil Remains Part of Cochran County

Petroleum production continued long after the initial boom.

Cochran County wells produced approximately 6.9 million barrels in 1948, 7.3 million barrels in 1956, 6.2 million barrels in 1960, and more than 12.3 million barrels in 1978.

By the end of 2004, more than 503 million barrels of petroleum had been produced from Cochran County lands since the 1936 discovery.

Production declined as the fields matured, but oil did not disappear from the local economy.

Railroad Commission figures for February 2025 reported 127,173 barrels of crude oil produced in Cochran County during that month.

Oil therefore remains part of Cochran County's economy and landscape nearly ninety years after the first producing well, although the county should not be characterized as one of the principal modern oil-producing counties of West Texas.

Agriculture and Oil Grow Together

World War II and the postwar years transformed Cochran County into a more diversified economy.

Petroleum production expanded while agriculture continued to occupy more land. By 1947 farmers were working approximately 108,000 producing acres, compared with only 38,647 acres in 1935.

The combination of farming, oil production, government, schools, local commerce, and petroleum-related employment supported rapid population growth.

Whiteface and the Oil Economy

Whiteface benefited particularly from petroleum development in the surrounding area and from its location near portions of the Slaughter Field.

Its population reached an estimated peak of approximately 600 residents in the early 1940s.

Whiteface incorporated in 1945. Agriculture, oil activity, schools, roads, and local businesses helped support the community.

Girlstown, U.S.A.

In 1949 an institution near Whiteface brought Cochran County national recognition.

Girlstown, U.S.A. grew from the work of Amelia Anthony, who had begun providing a home for girls in need.

Lubbock attorney Tom Duggan donated approximately 1,425 acres of ranchland near Whiteface for a permanent campus.

The Whiteface-area campus eventually served girls from across the United States and Canada.

Over time, the facility developed cottages, a dining hall, chapel, gymnasium, swimming pool, tennis courts, recreational areas, educational and vocational facilities, a stable of horses, and other services.

Girlstown became one of the best-known institutions associated with Cochran County.

In April 1987 Girlstown merged with Cal Farley's Boys Ranch.

The Lehman Gasoline Plant

Petroleum development also created industrial activity at Lehman.

In 1954, Tellepsen Petro-chem Constructors built the Lehman Gasoline Plant.

The operation became one of Cochran County's most important nonagricultural industrial facilities and later operated in conjunction with a National Sulphur Company facility.

Morton's Growth

Morton survived being bypassed by the railroad because its position as county seat gave it a different economic foundation.

County offices, schools, banks, retail stores, highway traffic, agricultural businesses, cotton gins, professional services, and other institutions gradually made Morton the county's principal population center.

Morton's population grew from approximately 1,137 in 1940 to 2,274 in 1950 and 2,781 in 1960.

The County Reaches Its Peak

The population of Cochran County reached 6,417 in the 1960 census.

It remains the highest decennial census population recorded in county history.

In less than forty years, Cochran County had grown from only 67 residents in 1920 to more than 6,400.

Few statistics better demonstrate the extraordinary speed with which Texas' Last Frontier was settled and developed.

The Underground Water Supply

One of the most important developments in twentieth-century Cochran County was the expansion of irrigation.

Settlers had used groundwater from the early farming period, but improved pumps, engines, electricity, irrigation systems, and eventually center-pivot equipment allowed increasingly large areas of farmland to be watered.

The Ogallala Aquifer effectively became the county's underground water supply.

Irrigation reduced some of the risks associated with the western South Plains' unpredictable rainfall and helped make intensive commercial farming possible.

Cotton Country

Cotton became increasingly dominant in the county's agricultural economy.

Grain sorghum, wheat, peanuts, corn, cattle, and other products remained important, but cotton became one of the most visible features of the Cochran County landscape.

Cotton gins and other agricultural businesses became major local institutions, while improved trucks connected farms directly to regional markets.

By 1986 Cochran County contained approximately 300,000 acres of cropland, including about 110,000 irrigated acres.

Mechanization Changes Rural Life

Agricultural productivity increased, but the number of people required to operate the land declined.

Larger tractors, mechanical cotton harvesters, irrigation equipment, improved trucks, chemical weed control, modern planting and harvesting equipment, and later computerized agriculture allowed one farmer to work acreage that previously would have required several families and hired workers.

Small farms were combined into larger operations.

Rural schools consolidated. Country stores closed. Families increasingly lived in Morton or Whiteface rather than on isolated farmsteads.

Young people often left the county for college, military service, or employment elsewhere and did not return permanently.

This is why Cochran County could experience rising agricultural productivity while its population declined.

The Water Challenge

The Ogallala Aquifer made modern agriculture possible on a scale early ranchers could scarcely have imagined.

It also created a serious long-term challenge.

The southern Ogallala receives limited natural recharge. Water pumped for irrigation can therefore be removed much faster than it is replaced.

Groundwater availability remains one of the most important issues influencing the long-term future of agriculture on the Llano Estacado.

Agriculture in 2022

The United States Department of Agriculture's 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 349 farms in Cochran County covering 434,001 acres.

The average farm contained approximately 1,244 acres.

Cotton remained the dominant field crop, with approximately 47,959 acres reported in the 2022 agricultural census.

Other reported acreage included approximately 17,761 acres of grain sorghum, 12,354 acres of peanuts, 7,682 acres of wheat, and 2,470 acres of corn.

The county also reported 2,743 cattle and calves.

Those figures represent the modern result of a transformation that began when the great ranches were divided and sold to farmers a century earlier.

Population Begins to Fall

After reaching 6,417 residents in 1960, Cochran County entered a long period of population decline.

The decline did not necessarily mean that farming had failed. Rather, agriculture had become increasingly mechanized and consolidated.

Fewer people were needed to farm the same amount of land.

Retail businesses and services also became increasingly concentrated in larger regional centers, particularly Lubbock, Levelland, and other surrounding communities.

Better highways made it easier for residents to travel farther for goods and services, weakening some of the economic role once played by small local businesses.

The Railroad Loses Importance

The railroad that had created Whiteface, Lehman, and Bledsoe became progressively less important as highways and trucks took over more freight traffic.

Portions of the Santa Fe line in Cochran County were abandoned during the early 1980s.

The section between Bledsoe and Whiteface was abandoned in late 1983.

Lehman's Decline

Lehman had already suffered from economic changes before the rails disappeared.

The gasoline plant shut down in 1976, after which the facility served as a compressor station.

By the early 1980s Lehman's population had declined to only a handful of residents.

Railroad abandonment effectively ended the town's role as an active railroad community.

Bledsoe and Whiteface

Bledsoe remained a recognized community but never regained the commercial importance it had enjoyed during the late 1920s.

Whiteface proved more durable because its economy was connected not only to the railroad but also to agriculture, oil, schools, highways, and other community institutions.

Morton Survives the Railroad It Never Had

Perhaps the greatest irony in Cochran County's transportation history is that Morton — the community bypassed by the railroad — ultimately became the county's strongest town.

The courthouse and county government anchored Morton when the railroad had initially favored other communities.

When the railroad later disappeared, Morton lost much less than towns whose original purpose had depended on the tracks.

The county-seat election of 1924 therefore continued to shape the geography of Cochran County generations after the people who fought over it were gone.

Few measures illustrate the county's history more clearly than its population.

Cochran County moved from effectively no recorded population in 1890 to more than 6,400 people in 1960, then gradually declined as mechanization, farm consolidation, changing transportation, and migration reduced the number of residents required to sustain the local economy.

The scale of the early growth is extraordinary. Between 1920 and 1960 the population increased from 67 to 6,417 — nearly a hundredfold increase in only forty years.

The later decline was slower but sustained. By 2020 the county contained fewer than half as many residents as it had at its 1960 peak.

The Census Bureau estimated the July 1, 2025 population at 2,546, nearly unchanged from the 2020 census count.

Modern Cochran County remains a rural county whose identity is deeply connected to agriculture, petroleum, local government, schools, churches, family networks, and the communities that survived the transformations of the twentieth century.

Morton remains the county seat and largest community.

Whiteface remains the county's other incorporated community and continues to serve the farming and oil-producing country of eastern Cochran County.

Bledsoe survives near the New Mexico state line, while Lehman, Griffith, County Line, and other locations preserve the names and memories of communities that once supported schools, stores, depots, churches, gins, elevators, filling stations, and families.

A Changing Population

Cochran County's population has also changed culturally and demographically.

Census estimates indicate that Hispanic or Latino residents now make up a majority of the county's population.

Many county residents live in households in which a language other than English is spoken at home.

The demographic character of modern Cochran County therefore differs greatly from the tiny population of ranch employees and settlers counted at the opening of the twentieth century.

Agriculture and Oil Continue

The two industries that most dramatically transformed the county during the twentieth century remain visible today.

Cotton fields, irrigation systems, grain crops, cattle, farm equipment, agricultural businesses, oil wells, pumpjacks, pipelines, and petroleum facilities remain part of the everyday landscape.

The technologies are different, farms are generally larger, fewer people work the land, and the oil fields are mature, but the economic foundations established during the settlement and petroleum booms of the twentieth century have not disappeared.

Preserving a Rapidly Disappearing Past

Cochran County's relatively recent settlement makes historical preservation especially important.

Many of the people who built the county's first towns, farms, schools, churches, businesses, and public institutions lived within only a few generations of today's residents.

Yet physical evidence of their lives can disappear quickly. Abandoned schools deteriorate. Railroad structures vanish. Farmhouses are removed. Businesses close. Cemeteries become difficult to locate. Family photographs lose their identifications. Newspapers crumble. Documents are discarded when offices, businesses, churches, or families clean out storage.

Preserving photographs, public records, maps, newspapers, yearbooks, oral histories, family collections, cemetery information, military records, school histories, business records, and community stories is therefore essential to preserving a history that is much larger than the surviving buildings alone.

Looking across thousands of years of human activity and more than a century of permanent settlement, several themes repeatedly appear in Cochran County history.

Water

Water has influenced virtually every period of the county's history.

It influenced the travel and hunting patterns of Native peoples. It limited Spanish exploration and permanent settlement. Ranch headquarters depended upon wells, windmills, and dependable watering places.

The availability of water affected railroad development and the future of towns. Lack of dependable water helped limit Bledsoe's growth.

Underground water ultimately made large-scale agriculture possible.

Today, the future of the Ogallala Aquifer remains tied to the future of farming on the western South Plains.

Land

The ownership and use of land tell another major part of the county's story.

The grasslands first supported wildlife and Indigenous hunting societies. They later became part of enormous cattle empires such as the XIT and the Slaughter holdings.

The breakup of those ranches created family farms and brought the population necessary to organize Cochran County.

During the later twentieth century many small farms were again combined into larger agricultural operations.

In a sense, the history of land in Cochran County has repeatedly moved between concentration and division.

Transportation

Trails were followed by wagon roads. Wagon roads were joined by a railroad. The railroad was eventually superseded by paved highways and trucks.

Each transportation system changed which communities were economically favored.

Ligon moved to become Lehman because of the railroad. Whiteface relocated to meet it. Bledsoe grew because it was the end of the tracks. Morton survived without tracks because it possessed the courthouse.

When highway transportation eventually became dominant, the geography of economic advantage changed again.

Adaptation

Perhaps the strongest theme is adaptation.

Cochran County residents have repeatedly adjusted to conditions that threatened the viability of permanent settlement: geographical isolation, water scarcity, drought, sandstorms, the Great Depression, commodity-price swings, oil booms and busts, changing agricultural technology, groundwater decline, railroad abandonment, and sustained population loss.

The institutions and communities of the county changed, but they endured.

Local historical details concerning the ranches, early schools, settlement, county organization, county-seat rivalry, early communities, and residents are drawn primarily from the three Cochran County histories listed below. Online government and scholarly sources are included for additional documentation and updated statistical information.