Borden County

Borden County, at the edge of the Llano Estacado, is bounded on the east by Scurry County, on the south by Howard County, on the west by Dawson County, and on the north by Lynn and Garza counties. The rolling, broken land of the county drains to the Colorado River and its tributaries and to Lake J. B. Thomas. The Caprock, Gail Mountain, and Muchakooga Peak are notable physical features. The soils are loams, sandy loams, and clay. The county center is at 32°45' north latitude and 101°25' west longitude, seventy miles southeast of Lubbock. The county comprises 907 square miles at 2,400–3,000 feet elevation. The annual rainfall is 18.2 inches, and the area has a 214-day growing season. The average minimum temperature in January is 32° F; the maximum in July is 96°. The highway system includes U.S. Highway 180 (west-east) and Farm Road 669 (north-south).

Comanches hunted buffalo in the region before White settlement. It was within the range of the Penateka band, also called the Honey-Eaters or Wasps, the largest and best-known Comanche band. The Penatekas led the advance into the southern plains in the eighteenth century after the people, a segment of the northern Shoshones, learned the use of Spanish horses and transformed themselves from impoverished root and plant gatherers to hunters. Settlers were not attracted to the area that is now Borden County until the end of the nineteenth century. It was too distant from the United States Army's frontier outposts to be safe even after the Civil War, and it seemed too dry to sustain ranching and farming. The county was marked off in 1876 from Bosque County and named for Gail Borden, Jr., a newspaper publisher and organizer of the Republic of Texas, and a surveyor who helped lay out the site of Houston and prepared the first topographical map of Texas.