Where is West Texas?
On Wichita Falls, history, and a big tent West Texas
The Interstate 35 corridor in Texas runs up and down the eastern third of the state. Along it just south of the Red River is Dallas-Fort Worth, the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan area. Further south are Austin and San Antonio, the 11th and 7th largest cities in the United States, respectively. At its southern most point in Texas, I-35 terminates in Laredo, the largest inland port in the country.
It’s a clear axis not just in the Lone Star State but for the entire country. The corridor doesn’t have a comparable counterpart to its west until El Paso (roughly 550 miles west of I-35 in San Antonio) and Las Cruces run north along I-25 to Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, and Denver.
Somewhere west of I-35 is West Texas, but where, exactly?
I grew up west of I-35 in Austin, a city much further culturally than the 375 miles that separate it from my current home in Lubbock. I can tell you with great certainty that I didn’t have the fortune of growing up in West Texas.
According to Wikipedia, the boundaries of West Texas have long been debated and are never fully agreed upon. It suggests that West Texas can be found if one were to draw a line from Wichita Falls down to Del Rio. Just west of that line would fall Abilene and San Angelo, which West Texas surely wouldn’t be complete without.
“Abilene isn’t West Texas, it’s the Big Country” or “San Angelo isn’t West Texas, it’s the Concho Valley”, you might say. This is no different than saying “Seattle isn’t on the West Coast, it’s in Washington.” It’s both. The Big Country, Concho Valley, Permian Basin, Panhandle, Far West Texas, etc. are sub regions of West Texas. They’re included under the umbrella, not something separate.
There’s no denying the difficulty of labeling definitive locations in a state as large, diverse, and uniquely-shaped as Texas. What was considered West Texas throughout history?
When Texas Technological College and Texas Christian University began to square off as Southwest Conference foes in the 1950s, the nickname for the newly minted rivalry game between the schools in Lubbock and Fort Worth was the “West Texas Championship.” Even the broadest interpretation of West Texas would have to leave out Fort Worth today, as the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is far too intertwined with the state’s axis of densely populated urban areas along I-35 to ever be categorized with the much more rural and sparsely populated West Texas.
The first convention of the West Texas Chamber of Commerce was held in Mineral Wells in 1919. Mineral Wells is outside the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, but is east of the aforementioned imaginary Wichita Falls-Del Rio line. Stamford and Abilene served as the West Texas Chamber’s headquarters in later years. It fought for the establishment of Texas Technological College, which today is the Texas Tech University System that has campuses in Lubbock, Amarillo, Midland-Odessa, San Angelo, El Paso, and Abilene.
Absent from that list of Texas Tech campus locations is Wichita Falls, which in a recent Twitter poll was rejected by 71% of respondents as not being part of West Texas. It’s not the first time nor will it be the last time that a majority of people are incorrect.
In 1966, Wichita Falls hosted an industrial conference for the West Texas Chamber of Commerce. There is currently legislation pending that would add Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls to the Texas Tech University System.
How can we leave Wichita Falls out of West Texas if they are:
West of the I-35 corridor
West of where the West Texas Chamber of Commerce held its first convention
A former host of an official West Texas Chamber of Commerce event
Home to a Texas Tech University System institution
Wichita Falls may be North Texas and it may be Texoma, but it’s also West Texas, just as Amarillo may be the Panhandle and Midland-Odessa may be the Permian Basin, but they’re all West Texas.