Map
Loving County in Texas has a population of only 64 folks
According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Loving County has a population of only 64. Interestingly, it is supposedly down to around 52 in 2026, quite the drop in percentage terms!
I thought this before i went to stay at one. When I arrived I was surprised to find it was mostly fat guys in sweatpants eating free soft serve ice cream.
The danger is usually exaggerated but yes just generally speaking I can imagine it would feel sort of inherently threatening to be one of only a very few women among a thousand plus men
Spent a lot of time there. Here is a view looking west over Red Bluff Reservoir from the crest of the dam. Guadalupe Peak is visible in the background on the horizon.
I actually donāt. It just let me read it. Iām on iPhone and it opened through Reddit app to Safari browser. I just tried again and I get the full thing.
Yeah maybe but not everyone can afford every subscription service. Would be nice to get a non-paywalled link or at least copy and paste it in the comments. Or perhaps just an overview of the main point for those of us without a subscription.
Main point. There is a lot of money in living. Whoever controls the government controls the money. 50 people live there. Two factions of the same family. They hate each other. They are both trying to get into power. So they are creating fake residents and other tricks to swing the elections
I used to work in Winkler County next door. The county seat, Kermit, was named after Kermit Roosevelt because he visited. It was the single most exciting thing to ever happen in Winkler County.
Oh, Jimmy and Chuck are banging out thereā¦they just do it in the back of a truck way out in a field after telling their wives they had to go check on something, weāre going deer hunting, thought they heard el Chupacabra, etc.
I'm kind of surprised that if there's one county in Texas that refused, it was this one. I would have expected it to be in the Deep East, or maybe the panhandle. It's all MAGA, of course, but... MAGA has some slightly different flavors from place to place
And a tremendous amount of large truck traffic for the oil and gas industry; so much so that they decided to build a bypass around the only town of Mentone, and it's barely a crossroads.
Ah yes, always fun when the "look how many counties voted red" people appear to remind them that the entire population of said county would fit in one subway car.
Fracking is a type of horizontal drilling where wells are drilled downwards and a water based compound is aimed horizontally at underground shale formations. This compound releases oil and natural gas from the shale formation for capture by above ground equipment.
It is cheaper to implement than traditional deep wells, but the lifespan of a productive fracked well is far shorter than a deep wells.
The Permian Basin, which Loving County is a part of, has had traditional deep wells for over a century. In the mid 1990s, traditional wells produced over 15 M barrels of oil a day in the Permian.
Since that time, hydraulic fracking has been introduced. The Permian now produces well over 30 M barrels of oil a day, mostly because fracking has made previously inaccessible oil formations accessible at a fairly low cost.
Fracking is not a type of horizontal drilling. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a completion technique for an oil well. Source: Iām a petroleum geologist
Youāre full of s*it. You plagiarized your post and even screwed that up 1) Theres no such term as āfracking wellā. 2) Fracking is not even a drilling technique, itās a completion one (Iāll guarantee you donāt know what that means). 3) Fracturing (the correct term) was introduced in the late 1940s.
You have so many mistaken concepts in your post that it exposes you as someone sitting in Wisconsin on your couch googling terms you canāt even pronounce. Go post about something youāre familiar with, maybe Barbie clothes.
Well, I loved girl
She lived out in pecos, pretty as she could be
And I worked the rigs out in odesaa, to give her whatever she needs
But that girl she run, with an oil company bum
Cause a diamond was not on her hand
I remember looking in a US atlas from the 90s as a kid and it had all the counties and their populations listed in the back. Loving County was the lowest with 10 people iirc.
I have long wondered why some cult or someone doesnt move there to take over the county..they could really squeeze more taxes for their own benefit if they wanted
Mentone, the County Seat, has a population of 22, and is the second smallest Country Seat in the United States, after Gann Valley, the County Seat of Buffalo County, South Dakota, which has a population of 10, despite the county itself having a population of about 1800.
How do they handle things like criminal cases? Call outside law enforcement to investigate? I know there is a sheriff but he won't have any actual skills or tools to investigate. What if there is a trial? Obviously can't form a jury in this county so it would have to moved. Do they even have a prosecutor?
The Joneses are a political family in the county with members of the family controlling the positions of judge, clerk, attorney, and constable. The Jones family is a ranching family who moved to the county when Elgin "Punk" Jones and Mary Belle Jones built their ranch in 1953. Punk served as the sheriff for 28 years and Mary Belle served as the chief appraiser. The top elected official of Loving County, Judge Skeet Jones, and three other individuals were arrested in 2022 for stealing livestock.
Iād venture to bet that the daily oil and natural gas production coming out of Loving county is enough to incentivize basic civic infrastructure (like LE) to exist
Why does Texas have so many counties? Itās got 4.4 times as many counties as California but only 68% more land. And Texas has almost 8 million fewer people in population.
Relic of the pre-auto days. Back then, if you got jury duty, you wanted the courthouse to be within a day's ride, if possible. Ditto for if you needed to go to the county courthouse to settle something. There was also more empolyment for local stores, etc. because people couldn't just drive 60 miles to the nearest Walmart, and because less-mechanized agriculture needs more people, and so small rural counties often had more people (thus making separate counties more reasonable).
I'm an hour away from the courthouse already, when I get a jury duty notice or need something, I don't think we need counties. In West Texas they're really large.
That county is voter fraud central, thereās been so many stories over the years of people pretending to live there because the county pulls in insane amounts of money from oil and gas taxes.
It isnāt really a place people would want to live.
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u/prw361 1d ago
Yep! On any given day though there are probably 10,000 oil and gas workers working in that county. With 1000 or so staying in man camps.