Kent, Texas: Antelope Country

The little community of Kent sits thirty-six miles east of Van Horn at the foot of the Davis Mountains, where Interstate Ten, old U.S. Highway Eighty, and State Highway One-Eighteen all converge.

Before it had a name it had a reputation: the surrounding flats once teemed with pronghorn antelope, and early ranchers called the place simply Antelope. A post office arrived in eighteen ninety-two, carrying the new name Kent, and a second one followed a year later. For the next four decades the town held steady at around fifty souls, supplying four cattle operations, a general store, and not much else.

The school closed in nineteen sixty-one, the post office a year earlier, and Kent settled into the peaceful semi-ghost it remains today, a crossroads marker on one of the loneliest stretches of West Texas highway.