Midland: The Midway Point

Midland got its name from geography. When the Texas and Pacific Railway was building its line across West Texas in eighteen eighty-one, the surveyors needed a name for the station that sat roughly halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso. They chose the most literal option available, Midway Station, which became Midland in eighteen eighty-four when the town needed a name not already used elsewhere in Texas.

The two towns that grew up on either side of the Midland Basin, Midland and Odessa, have been linked and differentiated ever since. Odessa was the rough one, the blue-collar town, the place where roughnecks lived. Midland was the office town, the place where the oil companies put their regional headquarters and where the lawyers and engineers and geologists made their homes. In nineteen eighty-three, Forbes magazine named Midland one of the nicest places to live in America. At the same time, Odessa's population was reeling from the collapse of oil prices and watching its economy contract in real time.

The distinction was not merely one of income. Buzz Bissinger, who spent a year in the basin researching his book Friday Night Lights, described the relationship between the two towns in stark terms. Odessans saw Midland as a city of rich snobs. Midlanders saw Odessa as a city of rednecks and money burners. The Permian High School football rivalry against Midland Lee was as much a class contest as an athletic one.

Both towns were, from the beginning, built on the same thing: the oil beneath the same patch of desert. Midland handled the money. Odessa handled the machinery. The distinction between them is, in some ways, the distinction between the front office and the field, a separation that West Texas encoded into its two largest cities and has maintained ever since.