Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Dickens, TX

Dickens is a small city in West Texas and the county seat of Dickens County, sitting at the junction of U.S. Highway 82 and State Highway 70, about eight miles below the Caprock escarpment of the Llano Estacado and sixty miles east of Lubbock.

Dickens began as a supply point for the cowboy line camps of three of the great Texas cattle ranches — the Spur, Pitchfork, and Matador ranches — with the first settlers arriving in the area in the late 1880s.

Dickens officially got its name in 1892, when the U.S. Postal Department located a post office there, and in that same year town lots were sold and Dickens replaced Espuela as the county seat.

Dickens County itself was named for J. Dickens, a man who died at the Alamo, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

The Dickens County Courthouse, a Romanesque Revival building designed by E. L. Aiken, was built in 1893 and still anchors the town as the seat of county government.

The 2020 census counted just 219 people in Dickens, living in 95 households — a steep fall from the town's peak of about 500 residents in 1927.

The city park at Dickens Springs grew out of a ten-acre donation of spring-fed land around what developer Dr. M. S. Crow called 'Crow Springs' in 1891, near where pioneer John A. Askins had settled in 1883.

Famed Texas bootmaker and saddle maker Charles Weldon Cannon (1915–1997), a Dickens County native, made his celebrated boots and saddles in Dickens.

Dickens is split between two school districts — the Spur Independent School District and the Patton Springs Independent School District — and the county lies within the Western Texas College district.

Dickens has a semiarid climate and covers less than one square mile of land, with the Croton Breaks lying to its east and Mackenzie Peak to its north.