Midland began as a dot on a timetable. In 1881 the Texas & Pacific Railway laid track across the Llano Estacado — the high, flat, semi-arid "staked plains" of West Texas — and a townsite went up at the midway point between Fort Worth and El Paso, first called Midway Station and renamed Midland in 1884. Herman Garrett, a sheep rancher, was among the first permanent residents, and Midland County was organized in 1885. For its first decades the town was ranching country: cattle and sheep on the wide high plains at nearly 2,800 feet.
The oil came in 1923. The Santa Rita No. 1 well, drilled out in the Permian Basin, struck a field of staggering size and set off a boom that remade West Texas — and Midland made itself its capital. Rather than the rigs and roughnecks of the field, Midland drew the offices, the geologists, the landmen, and the executives; by 1929 dozens of oil companies ran their Permian operations from downtown. Where blue-collar Odessa worked the field a few miles west, white-collar Midland ran the business. The boom has come and gone in waves ever since, and the horizontal-drilling resurgence after 2010 set the whole cycle spinning again.
Why People Visit Midland Texas
Midland draws visitors with a mix of oil-country heritage, museums, and that unmistakable skyline standing up off the West Texas plains. Travelers find it both the business capital of the Permian Basin and a proud, practical high-plains city with deep boom-and-bust history. It is ambitious, plainspoken, and unmistakably West Texan.
