Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Kermit, TX

Kermit is the county seat of Winkler County in far West Texas, and it was named for Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had hunted pronghorn on a local ranch shortly before the town was named.

Kermit began as a supply center for the scattered ranches of the area and became the county seat when Winkler County was organized in 1910, the same year its first public school and post office opened.

By 1926 drought had shrunk Kermit to just three houses and the courthouse in use, but oil was discovered in the nearby Hendrick oilfield on July 16, 1926, and the town boomed almost overnight.

Kermit had 6,267 residents at the 2020 census, up from 5,708 in 2010 but still well below its 1960 peak of 10,465 people.

The 2020 census counted 2,193 households in Kermit, and about 66 percent of its residents identified as Hispanic or Latino.

Residents voted to incorporate Kermit on February 15, 1938, and a bank finally opened in 1945 after years of oil-driven growth.

In 1966 the last working wooden oil derrick in the Permian Basin was moved from Loving County to Pioneer Park in Kermit as a monument to the oil industry.

A sinkhole that opened on oil-company land near Kermit in June 1980 grew within four days into a crater roughly 400 by 200 feet and drew national attention.

Kermit sits in a semiarid stretch of the Permian Basin with a hot arid climate, averaging only about 12 inches of rain a year.

The Kermit Independent School District, formed in 1928, runs Kermit Elementary, Kermit Junior High, and Kermit High School, and all of Winkler County is zoned to Odessa College.