W. Texas becomes more lonely as population drops West Texas becomes ever more lonely as population drops

Despite the state's growth, many counties are continuing to decline

Charlie Steddun has the bus to himself during his hourlong ride to Wink Junior High School from his home in Loving County. For the district, fewer students means less funding. Charlie Steddun has the bus to himself during his hourlong ride to Wink Junior High School from his home in Loving County. For the district, fewer students means less funding. Photo: Albert Cesare, For The Chronicle Photo: Albert Cesare, For The Chronicle Image 1 of / 6 Caption Close W. Texas becomes more lonely as population drops 1 / 6 Back to Gallery

"There are too many trees," he said. "You can't see the sky."

Harrison, now 26, is back in Winkler County, drawn by a job in the aptly named community of Notrees.

But he is in the minority. The 2010 Census confirmed what anyone passing through the scrublands of West Texas already knew: People are leaving, and no one is taking their place, even with oil at more than $100 a barrel. The people who remain often drive an hour or more to visit a doctor, buy a pair of jeans or see a movie.

So you might wonder why anyone is still there, in this place where natural beauty is defined by dry creek beds and scraggly mesquite, where public transit is a school bus and Starbucks is a punch line.

"The greatest sunsets. The stars are just right there. You hear the coyotes howling," says Billy Burt Hopper, sheriff of Loving County, home to 82 people and the least-populated county in the United States.

"It's the last frontier."

Texas recorded the largest population growth in the nation over the past decade, adding 4.5 million people for a total of 25.1 million. But 79 of its 254 counties lost people, all but a handful of them west of Interstate 35. Even more would have lost population if not for the decade's phenomenal Latino growth; the number of Anglos declined in 162 Texas counties, including much of West Texas and the Panhandle.

The shift to the state's cities and suburbs has been happening since at least the 1960s, as people died or moved away from the vast emptiness of the west and the endless stretches of the Panhandle.

"Young people want to be where there are more amenities and hustle and bustle," says Bonnie Leck, Winkler County judge for the past 17 years, long enough to see both the economy and the population fluctuate with the fortunes of the surrounding oil and gas fields.

For every Marfa, which capitalized on the legacy of artist Donald Judd to reinvent itself as an arts and tourist town, there are a dozen Kermits, Van Horns and Tahokas, barely hanging on as people choose modern life over wide open spaces.

"You'd be amazed how many men would live out here, but you're not going to get their wives five miles from Walmart," Hopper says.

8 square miles per person

Loving County, just south of the New Mexico state line, doesn't have a Walmart or much of anything else, although not everyone thinks that's a bad thing.

"I'm not a big-city person," says Justin Siebrandt, a sheriff's deputy who moved there three years ago from Bushland, west of Amarillo.

If so, Siebrandt may have found his perfect home in Mentone, which is almost 30 miles from the nearest grocery store and boasts 15 people, the 1935 Loving County Courthouse, the post office and a gas station that also sells beef jerky, sodas and beer.

The cafe closed last year, but at least people no longer have to bring in their own drinking water. The county's first public water supply system was completed in 2007.

With just 30 miles of paved road - that would be State Highway 302 - and another 30 of paved-turning-to-potholes county roads, most people are scattered across ranchland reached only by private roads cutting through its 673 square miles of desert, punctuated by several hundred oil and gas wells.

Loving County is, technically, in the midst of a population boom, with a 2010 population of 82, up from 67 in 2000.

"That was an undercount," says rancher and County Judge Skeet Jones.

He and Hopper later made their own list.

"We know everybody that lives here," Jones said. "We counted 84."

Since then, one person died and another moved away.

Another 200 or more work in Loving County's oil and gas fields every weekday, coming from Pecos, Kermit and Odessa, 75 miles to the east.

"It's a shame," says Hopper, who also serves as tax assessor-collector. "We're out here with hundreds of oil wells, and no businesses to take advantage of that."

He and his deputies stay busy with oil field thefts, enforcing speeding laws and the occasional arrest, mainly of people stopped for speeding and found to be wanted in another county.

There's no jail. Loving County has shared jail facilities with Reeves and Ward counties since 1993, when it became too expensive to bring its own jail into compliance with court rulings. Nor is there a department dispatcher; the phone is forwarded to Hopper or the deputy on call.

Many residents like the solitude.

"It's nice and quiet," says County Clerk Liz Jones, whose brother-in-law is the county judge and whose son-in-law is Deputy Seibrandt. Her daughter, Shane Seibrandt, is the justice of the peace.

But Skeet Jones says the lack of people, and the family ties of those who remain, can make it difficult to fill what few jobs the county offers.

Finding an election judge who isn't related to someone on the ballot is especially tricky. But at least they don't have to find two. Loving County holds only a Democratic primary, even though Hopper says most residents vote Republican in the general election.

Population loss isn't unique to West Texas.

Rice University demographer Steve Murdock says it's happening all across the plains, from the Dakotas to Texas. A few East Texas counties also lost population over the decade.

Blame technology.

Agriculture is more mechanized, so it requires fewer workers, says Eduardo Segarra, chairman of the department of agriculture and applied economics at Texas Tech University.

Changes in agriculture

The number of agriculture jobs has actually increased, as people leave the farm for cities and work in marketing, transportation, product development and other facets of the industry.

That helps to explain why West Texas' cities - Lubbock, Amarillo, Midland-Odessa and El Paso - are growing, even as the rural population has shrunk. But it offers little consolation to counties with few prospects for renewal.

"We'd love to have new industry, but we have to be realistic," says Leck, the Winkler County judge. "We only have 7,000 people in this county. We're not going to have a big GM plant."

Carlos Urias, her counterpart in Culberson County, is even more glum.

"What business wants to come to Culberson County?" he asks.

While some West Texas counties have lucrative oil and gas fields, providing both jobs and tax revenues for local governments and schools, Culberson County does not, helping to explain why its population has dropped below 2,400 people spread across 3,815 square miles of forbidding landscape.

Van Horn, the county seat, has a grocery store - two if you count the dollar store, which sells food among the miscellany on its shelves - a hospital and several truck stops lining Interstate 10. For everything else, people go to El Paso, 120 miles away.

"That's nothing to us," Urias says.

The distances can be daunting to newcomers, however.

The trade-off is a sense of community, with the school as its soul.

"On a Friday night, if there's a game, 60 or 70 percent of the community is there, whether they have a kid playing or not," says Debbie Engle, principal for Van Horn's junior high and high school.

Smaller classes

But even the schools are shrinking.

Just 475 students are enrolled in the Culberson County-Allamore school district, almost 200 fewer than seven years ago. Eighty-nine percent are Latino, and 82 percent qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches, an indicator of poverty.

"We're pretty remote," agrees Superintendent Guillermo Mancha Jr., who moved to Culberson County three years ago after serving as principal of a 1,400-student middle school in Fort Bend County. "We lose families every year. We lose kids. And when we lose kids, we lose funding."

With just 46 teachers - the district relies on the Texas Virtual School Network for some advanced classes - Mancha has little wiggle room for the coming state budget cuts. Soaring gas prices have made it more expensive to bus students from across the county, as well as to send them to neighboring districts for athletic and academic competitions.

"Our kids are academically capable to stand up with anybody," he says, noting that 10 of last year's graduating class of 36 were accepted to the University of Texas at Austin.

The town now hopes to capture a slice of the tourism market as people move between Marfa, 70 miles to the south, and Guadalupe Mountains National Park, a similar distance to the north. But Urias sounds melancholy as he considers his hometown's prospects.

"We always said Van Horn is better than Marfa," he says. "But no. Marfa's nicer. They preserved their courthouse."

Van Horn's center of government is a one-story, 1960s-era courthouse, although the crumbling remains of the 1912 jail stand in a nearby park.

The school district and hospital are the main employers, and Urias laments decisions made 20 years ago to turn away prison construction. Nearby Hudspeth County now has a private prison; Fort Stockton, to the south, has a state prison unit.

"Once they come knocking, in today's economy, you have to take advantage of it," Urias says.

Still, he isn't entirely pessimistic.

The county has several talc mines and wind energy projects, in addition to ranching and farming. One company is drilling for natural gas.

"We're hoping," he says, thinking of the jobs and taxes a big natural gas field could provide.

"I'm a glass half-full person. I have to be."

jeannie.kever@chron.com