Vega, Texas

Vega is the county seat of Oldham County, one of the emptiest counties in the Texas Panhandle, and it got that status only after a five-year fight with a rival town. The first settler, N.J.

Whitfield, arrived in eighteen ninety-nine. In nineteen oh three he sold a hundred-foot right-of-way strip across the southern county to the Choctaw, Oklahoma, and Texas Railroad, later absorbed into the Rock Island system, and A.M.

Miller opened the first store in the new townsite that same year. A post office and a saloon followed the next year, then a school that doubled as a Masonic lodge. The railroad arrived in nineteen oh nine and the town boomed briefly.

In nineteen fifteen, Vega finally bested nearby Tascosa in the battle for county seat status, a rivalry that had simmered for years. Route Sixty-Six passed through Vega and brought tourist traffic in the mid-twentieth century. The town's population today sits around nine hundred, holding steady on the high Llano Estacado, two thousand nine hundred feet above sea level.