Follow
Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in Dimmit County, Texas.
Official Website
History
Coahuiltecan Indians native to Dimmit County were later squeezed out by Apache and Comanche. Hostile tribes harassed settlers, forcing some to pull up stakes. Texas Rangers and local volunteers, as well as disease, ran the Indians out of the county by 1877.
Dimmit County was officially established in 1858 from parts of Bexar, Webb, Maverick, and Uvalde counties. The county was organized in 1880.
Early settlers found Dimmit County to be an abundant grassland with mesquite, oak, and ash trees and wildlife that included buffalo, deer, turkeys, wild horses, panthers, and javelinas. Artesian springs, bubbling up from a vast reservoir of underground water, fed into running streams that harbored giant catfish, crawfish, and mussels. Explorers found the area a good place to hunt wild mustangs, and to feed and water cattle.
Pioneering cattleman Levi English settled Carrizo Springs in 1865 with a group of fifteen families from Atascosa County. Within two years, they were joined by a second group of settlers from Goliad County. Early dwellings were crude adobe structures or dugouts. In 1880, Levi English donated land for a county courthouse, schools, and churches in the town.
Lawlessness, banditry, and in particular cattle rustling from both sides of the Mexican border, pervaded until the 1880s. Marshal J. King Fisher, managed to bring about a reduction in the lawlessness. King also staunchly enforced the "dry county" law once the residents voted to outlaw the sale of alcohol.
Dimmit County's first producing oil well was found in 1943. In 1980, Dimmit County farmers earned about $20 million for their crops, while about $60 million in oil and gas was produced.
Formation of the 1914 White Man's Primary Association was designed to exclude Mexican Americans from any meaningful participation in county politics. In the 1944 Smith v. Allwright case, the United States Supreme Court found the White Primary to be unconstitutional.
D.C. Frazier drilled the first artesian well, which spouted forth gallons of water a minute, near Carrizo Springs in 1884. By 1900 about twenty-five artesian wells were flowing in the Carrizo Springs area, but most of the water was wasted, and very little was used for irrigation. Colonel J. S. Taylor introduced large-scale Bermuda onion and strawberry agriculture to the area, and was the first to use irrigation on a large scale in Dimmit County. In 1899, Taylor built a thirty-foot dam across the Nueces River to irrigate 2,000 acres of farmland. He also drilled a deep artesian well. By 1910, Taylor's methods were being imitated by a number of other developers and vegetable farmers. Irrigation helped make Dimmit County part of the Texas Winter Garden Region. By the 1920s, however, artesian water began to dry up. The necessity of installing expensive pumps drove many farmers out of business. By 1934, the United States Department of the Interior concluded that the existing water supply would not support substantial additional development. By 1965 only about 15,000 acres was being irrigated. Much of the land reverted to rangeland.
The Big Wells Oil Field, east of Big Wells was discovered in 1969. The field produces from the Cretaceous San Miguel Formation sandstone underlying the Olmos Formation sandstone. The field extends north into Zavala.
The Eagle Ford oil field was reported to be under development in 2011 with 3,000 wells projected to extract oil by hydraulic fracturing from tight shale formations. The oil play has improved business activity in the county but raised fears regarding the adequacy of water supplies as fracking requires injection of large quantities of water under pressure into wells to break surrounding rock.
Adjacent Counties
Cities & Communities
- Asherton
- Big Wells
- Brundage
- Carrizo Hill
- Carrizo Springs (County Seat)
- Catarina
Links
National Register of Historic Places
