Toyah: Oldest Town in Reeves County

Toyah is the oldest townsite in Reeves County. Its name comes from a Native American word meaning flowing water, a fitting description for a place that grew up around a reliable spring in the dry Trans-Pecos. The first train arrived in eighteen eighty-one, and within years Toyah had four churches, four stores, two banks, and two hotels, all serving ranchers who shipped cattle from its yards.

By nineteen ten it held just over one thousand people. That same decade saw one of the darkest episodes in the town's history: in October of nineteen oh six, a Black man named J. I.

Pitts was lynched by a mob for living with his white wife. No one was prosecuted. The Great Depression ended the boom, a flood and severe windstorm struck in two thousand four, and today Toyah holds fewer than one hundred residents, a near ghost town along the interstate.