Welcome
If you're looking for the city of Terrell, it's in Kaufman County.
Kerr's Hotel, Sanderson, Texas
Terrell County is on the boundary of "south" Texas and "west" Texas, just northeast of the Big Bend. The county seat is Sanderson and the only other community is Dryden. The only reliable water source is the Rio Grande and we only get about 14 inches (360mm) of rain per year. In 2020, the census counted only 760 people in Terrell County. The highest population was reported in 1950 but was less than 3200 citizens for the entire county.
Sanderson was originally a crew-changing station for the railroad in Pecos County but that practice was stopped in 1995. As a result, the population in the area has declined each year. When Terrell County was created in 1905, Sanderson was the largest community in the area and became the county seat. Dryden, a little farther east, began as a railroad section house in 1882 but in 1988, had only 13 residents and the post office has been closed. In 1926, 11,000 lambs averaging $6 per head were sold in Dryden in one of the largest lamb sales in history. Cedar Station was centered around a gas station and a house about 15 miles east of Dryden but lasted only a few years and is now also a ghost town. Most of our communites are centered around the ranches and we have about 50 of those.
If your family lived in this area before 1905, their records will be in Pecos County.
Since there are only two real communities left, I haven't included a community page on this site. However, our TXGenWeb site has a list of landmarks and vanished communities.
Resources
On-Site
Cemeteries Census Records Families History Local Information Lookups Maps Military Records News Articles Obituaries Photographs Queries Surrounding Counties Vital RecordsOff-Site
Terrell Archives Other TXGenWeb Counties Portal to Texas History Query BoardPublications
Books
Terrell County Texas: Its Past, Its People, Alice Evans Downie, Terrell County Historical Commission, 1978 - Dryden (Tex.) - 747 pagesThe Sanderson Flood of 1965: Crisis in a Rural Texas Community, Russell Ashton Scogin, (Sul Ross State University, 1995)
Tales of the Flood, a collection of oral histories by C.W. (Bill) Smith
Newspapers
Trans-Pecos News, 1902-?Sanderson Times, 1909-present
Terrell County News-Leader, -2013
Terrell County Sun, 2013-present