Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Bledsoe Bledsoe, TX

Bledsoe is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in western Cochran County, Texas, only about a mile and a half from the New Mexico state line and roughly 68 miles west of Lubbock.

Bledsoe was founded in 1925 as the western terminus of the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway and was named for Samuel T. Bledsoe, the railroad's president.

The first regularly scheduled train ran from Lubbock to Bledsoe on December 1, 1925.

Bledsoe quickly became one of the largest cattle-shipping stations in the Southwest and the largest on the Santa Fe line, and by 1929 it had grown to about 400 residents.

In its boom years Bledsoe had several stores, four filling stations, three lumberyards, two hotels, a movie theater, a dance hall, an electric plant, and an ice plant.

Bledsoe's first school opened in November 1925, and one of its first businesses printed the Cochran County News, the county's first newspaper.

The Bledsoe post office was officially established on April 8, 1926.

The Great Depression and a scarce water supply shrank Bledsoe to 150 people by 1936, and its population held at about 125 through the end of the twentieth century.

The former Bledsoe Independent School District merged into the Whiteface Consolidated Independent School District on July 1, 1996.

Bledsoe was counted as a census-designated place for the first time in the 2020 census, which recorded just 56 residents.