24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Summerfield, TX

Summerfield is an unincorporated community in northwestern Castro County in the Texas Panhandle, sitting on U.S. Route 60 about 18 miles northwest of Dimmitt, the county seat.

Summerfield was founded in the late 1890s under the name Boom, but postal authorities renamed it in 1907 because another Texas community already had that name.

Summerfield takes its name from surveyor John S. Summerfield, who helped mark the boundaries of the vast XIT Ranch in the 1880s — ranch land that enclosed the townsite.

Summerfield grew up along the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway near Castro Creek and became a local market for the ranches and farms of the surrounding plains.

Summerfield's first school met in the dugout home of E. C. Millet until a one-room schoolhouse was built in 1902, and its first teacher, Lenna Green, famously taught in Castro County, boarded in Parmer County, and drew her salary from Deaf Smith County.

In 1902 the International Land Company of Chicago offered a free building site and cash to any congregation that would build a church in Summerfield; the Baptists took the deal with Methodist help, and the building long hosted a union Sunday school for several denominations.

Summerfield built a brick schoolhouse with three classrooms and an auditorium in 1921, but its school district was consolidated into Hereford's in 1947 and the old building became a community center.

Summerfield endured prairie fires, blizzards, and drought and reported 75 residents in 1940 and 60 in both 1990 and 2000; when it appeared as a census-designated place for the first time in 2020, it counted just 34 residents.

Summerfield sits at an elevation of 3,937 feet on the High Plains, and despite its tiny size it still keeps its own post office under ZIP code 79085.

As recently as the 1980s Summerfield had a Baptist church, a post office, the converted schoolhouse as a community building, two stores, and a grain elevator serving local farms.