24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near North Texline Texline, TX

Texline's name tells you exactly where it is — the town sits in northwestern Dallam County right on the Texas–New Mexico state line, on U.S. Highway 87 about eleven miles southeast of Clayton, New Mexico.

Texline has been at the center of a long-running boundary dispute over whether it lawfully belongs to Texas or New Mexico, a legacy of 19th-century surveying errors along the state line.

Texline began in 1888 when the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway bought land from the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company and built a division point there, complete with a depot, hotel, post office, and railroad shops by the end of that year.

Texline served as the seat of Dallam County from 1891 to 1903, when the county government was moved to Dalhart, and the county's first public school opened in Texline about 1892.

Texline incorporated in 1916, and its population peaked at 762 in the 1920 census during its railroad heyday.

When the railroad removed its shops from Texline in 1923, the town faded, dropping to 385 people by 1940.

The 2020 census counted 448 people in Texline, living in 160 households.

Texline hosts the XIT Trail Drivers' Reunion each year, a gathering honoring the cowboys of the famous XIT Ranch, once the largest fenced ranch in the world.

Texline lies in the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle, where farming and ranching around the town replaced the railroad economy that created it.

Despite a century of decline from its railroad-boom peak, Texline has held onto roughly 425 to 510 residents in every census since 1990.