Plainview: Where the South Plains Begins

Plainview has been the county seat of Hale County since the county organized in August eighteen eighty-eight, and its name describes itself with unusual accuracy: the view from here is plain in every direction, flat tabletop prairie stretching to the horizon with nothing to interrupt it. For its first decade and a half, Plainview was primarily a ranching supply point. Everything changed when the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway arrived in nineteen oh six.

Two years later, in nineteen oh eight, Wayland Baptist was chartered, and classes began in nineteen ten, giving the town both a rail connection and an academic institution. Cotton came with the irrigation that followed, and by the mid-twentieth century Plainview sat at the center of one of the most productive cotton-farming regions on the High Plains. The Ogallala Aquifer that made that irrigation possible has been declining ever since, and Plainview's future, like the rest of the South Plains, is tied to how the water question gets resolved.