Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Impact Impact, TX

Impact is a tiny incorporated town in Taylor County that is completely surrounded by the city of Abilene as an enclave within the Abilene metropolitan area.

Impact exists because of liquor: before 1960, alcohol sales were prohibited in Abilene and throughout Taylor County, which encouraged a thriving moonshine trade.

Advertising businessman Dallas Perkins, who owned a 20-acre poultry farm north of Abilene, bought 27 adjoining acres and pushed to incorporate a new town in 1960, naming it Impact after his advertising business.

Impact's residents, mostly Perkins' family and friends, voted 18 to 2 to permit liquor sales, and a 1963 Texas Supreme Court ruling upheld the town's incorporation and its right to sell liquor.

Two liquor stores opened in Impact in 1963 and racked up $463,000 in sales in their first month alone; one of them, Pinky's, was named for its pink elephant logo.

Liquor revenue paid to pave and light Impact's roads, start garbage pickup, and hire a policeman.

Impact remained the only wholly wet municipality in Taylor County until 1978, when Abilene voters legalized liquor sales by a margin of just 131 votes, wiping out the town's reason for being.

Impact covers only about 47 acres, and its population peaked at just 61 people in 1970.

With only 22 residents at the 2020 census, down from 35 in 2010, Impact is the second least populated municipality in Texas.

Those 22 residents lived in just 13 households at the 2020 census.