1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America's Emptiest County (original) (raw)

U.S.|1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America's Emptiest County

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/us/1-cafe-1-gas-station-2-roads-americas-emptiest-county.html

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Feb. 25, 2006

MENTONE, Tex. - How empty is Loving County?

So empty that when Sheriff Billy Burt Hopper ran for office in 2004, he and his opponent attended each other's campaign barbecues. So empty that it can't sustain two political parties: Republicans and Democrats all call themselves Democrats and vote in a single primary.

So empty that it has trouble seating 12 jurors who are not related to a defendant. (Not that there is much crime, although -- or maybe because -- Sheriff Hopper patrols in a pickup with two shotguns and an AK-47.) So empty that the jail was moved to Pecos in Reeves County, 26 miles away, in 1994.

In fact, this is the emptiest county seat of the emptiest county in the country.

At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 more are spread throughout the rest of Loving County's 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes -- about one person for every nine square miles.

But Loving County, east of the Pecos River just below New Mexico, is blessed with mineral riches: 360 producing gas and oil wells and 18 more being drilled, creating an enviable problem for the county -- forcing it to keep lowering its tax rate.

Yet it's modest enough, as a plaque outside the courthouse confesses: "Mentone has no water system (water is hauled in) nor does it have a bank, doctor, hospital, newspaper, lawyer, civic club or cemetery."

And since Mentone is the only town, neither does Loving County.

What it does have is the Boot Track Café (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county's oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

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