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History
LOVING COUNTY.
Loving County (F-6), the smallest county in the Permian Basin of West
Texas, is bounded on the east by Winkler County, on the south by Ward
County, on the west by the Pecos River and Reeves County, and on the
north by Eddy and Lea counties, New Mexico. The center of the county
lies at 31°50' north latitude and 103°35' west longitude. Mentone, the
county seat and only town in the county, is located in its
southwestern corner seventy-five miles west of Odessa. Loving County
consists of 671 square miles of flat desert terrain with a few
low-rolling hills stretching over calichified bedrock and wash
deposits of pebbles, gravel, and sand. The soils of the county-loams,
chalk, clays, and sands-support desert shrubs, cacti, range grasses,
and salt cedars along the river. Wildlife includes waterfowl, quail,
deer, badgers, javelinas, rabbits, bobcats, coyotes, armadillos,
skunks, opossums, raccoons, rattlesnakes, killifish, brine shrimp, and
turtles. Elevations vary from 2,686 to 3,311 feet above sea level.
Temperatures vary from an average low of 29° F in January to an
average high of 96° in July. The growing season lasts 222 days.
Rainfall averages just over ten inches. The county has an immature
drainage system made up of hundreds of playas and dry draws that feed
into the Pecos only after heavy rainfall. In 1936 Red Bluff Dam was
built across the Pecos on the Texas-New Mexico boundary for irrigation
and recreation. Water from the Pecos, however, is too saline for
drinking, so the 100 residents of the county haul water from a
community tank.
In the prehistoric era,
springs of pure water dotted the landscape and supported nomadic hunters
and their prey. Antonio de Espejo crossed the area in 1583, fording the
then-mighty Pecos at great risk. In 1854 Capt. John Popeqv
surveyed the area for a railroad route. Convinced that he could drill
artesian wells there, he returned in 1855 and located Pope's Camp
fifteen miles east of the mouth of Delaware Creek in northwestern Loving
County. After three years of unsuccessful attempts, he and his men
abandoned the camp. The Butterfield Overland Mail ran a stage station at
Pope's Camp from 1858 until 1861. From 1837 to 1874 the area of Loving
County was part of the Bexar land district. In 1874 the Texas
legislature separated Tom Green County from the Bexar District. In 1887
Loving County was separated from Tom Green County, but it remained
attached to Reeves County for judicial purposes. It was named for Oliver
Loving, an early Texas cattleman who was mortally wounded by Indians on
the Pecos in the area of the county as he rode in advance of his herd in
1866. Loving County is the only Texas county to be organized twice. The
first organization appears to have been a scheme to defraud on the part
of the organizers. Early in 1893 six men from Denver, Colorado,
organized the Loving Canal and Irrigation Company of Mentone, Texas,
with the stated purpose of migrating to isolated Loving County and
constructing an irrigation canal from the Pecos to surrounding farmland.
Although the 1890 United States census reported a population of only
three in Loving County, on June 13, 1893, the organizers of the canal
company filed a petition with the Reeves County Commissioners Court
signed by 150 allegedly qualified voters who requested separate
organization for Loving County. The court approved the petition and
allowed the organization of the county. A county election was held on
July 8, 1893, eighty-three votes were reported, and county organization
was approved. Mentone, a town laid out by the company organizers twelve
miles north of the present Mentone, was designated the county seat.
Irrigation company organizers and several nonresidents were elected to
county offices.
Subsequently, several
families came to live in or near Mentone, probably intending to buy
irrigated farmland. A general store and several adobe houses were built
there. The Loving County Commissioners Court voted to issue bonds valued
at $6,000 to build a courthouse in Mentone. Although construction began,
the building was never finished. In August 1893 the Pecos flooded and
destroyed the work that had been done on the irrigation project. With no
hope for crop harvests, the few settlers left the area. Although the
company organizers failed at promotion of irrigated land, they retained
control of county government. On September 6, 1893, the county
commissioners reportedly appointed County Judge J. J. Combs as agent of
the county to locate and acquire patents for county public school lands.
Combs chose four leagues in Dawson and Gaines counties, and the county
received the patents on February 9, 1894. The commissioners' court
authorized Combs to sell the four leagues on February 19, 1894, and he
sold them two days later. He conveyed one tract, League 271, to W. R.
Fowler in exchange for a promissory note in the amount of $3,099.60, due
five years later.
In the spring of 1894 H. C.
Withers and A. H. Randolph made a trip to Loving County to investigate
reports of the illegal county organization for the firm of W. H. Abrams
of New York, which represented a large Loving County landowner. They
found three people in Mentone. When Withers asked to examine the
tax-levy records, sheriff and tax collector W. A. Hunter told him that
county clerk R. G. Munn had taken the records to Denver. Loving County
reportedly held a second election of county officials on November 8,
1894, and the organizers and nonresidents were reelected to office.
There is evidence that neither of the Loving County elections was
legitimate. By 1897 the county officials fled the area. Taxes were not
collected for 1893 and 1894 and had not been assessed or collected for
1895 and 1896. County government was chaotic, and the state legislature
deorganized Loving County on May 12, 1897, reattaching it to Reeves
County. The Reeves County Commissioners Court taxed Loving County
landowners to pay off the county debt.
After Mentone was abandoned
in 1897, no town existed in Loving County. The 1900 census reported a
county population of eleven females and twenty-two males, all white. By
1910 the population grew to 248 whites and one black, after a legitimate
land and irrigation promotion established a settlement, called Juanita,
in the southwestern corner of the county. The settlement, which was
renamed Porterville in 1910, had a post office, several businesses, and
the first school and church in the county. Although Juanita had an
estimated population of 100 in 1909, a drought, compounded by the
failure of irrigation systems, reduced that number to sixty by 1914.
Although several irrigation
projects were attempted at the end of the nineteenth century and in the
first two decades of the twentieth, successful agribusiness in the
county was restricted to ranching. In 1887 three ranches ran 12,100
cattle valued at $96,800 in Loving County. By 1900 the total value of
livestock was reported at $568,406. The Johnson brothers, Sid Kyle, and
Young Bell ranched on large spreads in the county from 1898 to 1911. The
drought of 1910 decreased cattle holdings. New ranchers moved to the
county by 1912, including John Z. Means of Jeff Davis County, who owned
thirty-five sections of Loving County by 1915. The largest landowner
from 1915 to 1920 was the Texas and Pacific Railway, which owned 145
sections. Means, the railroad, and some smaller landowners hired foremen
to manage the land and did not settle in the county. The census of 1920
reported fifty-one men and thirty-one women, all white, living in the
county. Only one of the thirteen principal landowners listed between
1920 and 1926 gave his address as Loving County. By 1969 only 26.7
percent of Loving County landowners lived on their land.
Early in 1921 J. J. Wheat
and Bladen Ramsey organized the Toyah-Bell Oil Company and leased
acreage for drilling on the Russell Ranch. The company spudded the
Russell No.1 in the summer and brought in the first producer of the
county late in 1921. Although production from this well was short-lived,
real commercial production was found in the Pecos Valley Petroleum
Company Wheat No.1 on September 1, 1925. This well led to the
development of the Wheat oilfield, which attained its maximum production
in 1931 with 1,233,801 barrels, and to the discovery of other fields.
Oil activity in the county increased the population to 195-76 women and
119 men, all white-by 1930. The larger population produced the town of
Ramsey and led to the second organization of Loving County in 1931.
Ramsey was renamed Mentone and became the county seat. By 1933 several
oil camps were built in the county, and the population reached a record
of 600. In 1939 Mentone reported a population of 150 and twelve
businesses. The census of 1940 listed a county population of 282 whites
and 3 Hispanics.
After the county was
deorganized in 1897, the residents participated little in government. In
the 1908 presidential election, three votes were cast-all for the
Democratic candidate. No separate presidential returns were kept for the
county from 1908 until 1924, when the majority of twelve votes again
went to the Democratic candidate. From 1928 until 1952 the Democrats
continued to carry the county vote. In the 1950s the voters of the
county switched parties for Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1960 and 1964 they
voted for John Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The majority returned to
the Republican party in 1968 and remained there through the 1988
election, when George H. W. Bush won.
In 1950 the residents
numbered 225 whites, one black, and one Hispanic. In 1960 the county
reported 216 whites and ten blacks. In 1970 the population had fallen to
seventy-three, all white. The county closed its school system in 1972
because only two students were enrolled and its cost was $146,000 a
year; the students were transferred to Winkler County. In 1980 there
were fifty-nine whites and thirty-two Hispanics in the county; the
median age was 45.3 years. Fifty residents had received four years of
high school, and there were four college graduates. At the end of 1989
the estimated population increased slightly to 100, but prospects for
future development remained slim. In the summer of 1988 the county piped
drinking water to a 500-gallon tank in Mentone for use by residents.
Loving County and Mentone remained generally undeveloped because the
land was mostly held by absentee owners, because good water was scarce,
because cattle grazing made the best use of the unimproved arid surface,
and because oil and gas income from the subsurface obviated the need for
highly productive surface use. At the end of the 1980s Loving County had
no economic farming or manufacturing. The economy was based on oil and
gas production; in 1986 crude oil production was more than 1.7 million
barrels, gas-well gas totaled 42.3 billion cubic feet, and casinghead
gas production was 3.9 billion cubic feet. Although petroleum gave the
small population of Loving County the highest per-capita income of all
United States counties ($34,173), the area was isolated and undeveloped.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roscoe P. and Margaret B. Conkling, The
Butterfield Overland Mail, 1857-1869 (3 vols., Glendale, California:
Clark, 1947). Robert W. Dunn, The History of Loving County, Texas (M.A.
thesis, University of Texas, 1948; condensed in West Texas Historical
Association Year Book 24 [1948]).
Julia Cauble
Smith
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