LUBBOCK COUNTY is one of the oldest inhabited places in the state, if not the oldest. In the northern part of the city of Lubbock is the archeological site known as the Lubbock Lake Site, the first archeological site in Texas to be entered on the National Register of Historic Places. There, in Yellow House Canyon, preserved in the 20-foot wall of a dry lakebed, lies one of the very few known records of human habitation in Texas reaching back uninterrupted for at least 12,000 years. There Paleo-Indians camped and hunted the elephant, camel, bison, giant bear and prehistoric horse, all long since extinct. Although the evidence is not conclusive, some authorities believe Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was the first Spaniard to visit the lake, during his famous expedition of 1540.

From 10,000 B.C. to about A.D. 1000 the plains were inhabited by bands of Indians who lived off the land. When the Spaniards reached the plains they found tribes they called Quecheros or Teyas, probably ancestors of the Apaches. The area of West Texas including the Lubbock area was principally the domain of the Wanderers and the Penateka (Honey- Eaters) bands.

In the middle of the nineteenth century West Texas was considered a part of the "Great American Desert." As Capt. Randolph B. Marcy remarked after a reconnaissance through the area in 1849, "not a tree, shrub, or any other object, either animate or inanimate, relieved the dreary monotony of the prospects; it was a vast illimitable expanse of desert prairie...a land where no man, either savage or civilized, permanently abides; it spreads into a treeless, desolate waste of uninhabited solitude, which always has been, and must continue, uninhabited forever." The myth dissolved in the 1870s when the region was explored by hunters who moved across the plains slaughtering the buffalo herds. Lubbock County was split off from the Bexar District by the legislature on Aug. 21, 1876, as an unorganized county and was successively attached for administration to Young, Baylor, and Crosby counties. The census of 1880 reported 25 people living in the county, most of them sheep raisers from the Midwest living in Yellow House Canyon. The first semipermanent resident was a Mississippi sheepman, Zachary T. Williams, who came in the late 1870s. By about 1880 George W. Singer had arrived and opened a store and post office in Yellow House Canyon. Lubbock County was attractive to the growing number of people lured to West Texas by the favorable land laws of the state as well as by fertile soil. The census of 1890 listed only 33 people in the county, but after it was taken a wave of settlers in the summer and fall of that year boosted the number of county residents to about a hundred, many of them cattle raisers. Formal organization of Lubbock County came on March 10, 1891, when an election was held for the purpose and

Lubbock was made the county seat. The town had been put together by a group of town promoters led by Frank E. Wheelock and W. E. Rayner, who, in a burst of cooperation somewhat unusual for contending town promoters, compromised their differences and in December 1890 united their competing settlements, Monterey and old Lubbock, into the single town of Lubbock. The new county was named for Col. Thomas S. Lubbock, former Texas Ranger, Confederate officer, and brother of a former governor.

In 1901 a writer characterized the South Plains as the "most alluring body of unoccupied land in the U.S.," in spite of its dryness. Lubbock County seemed destined to join its neighbors as a thinly populated farming county. Two factors intervened to change this: the coming of the railroad and Texas Tech. Shortly after 1900 railroad-promotion schemes flourished, but none became reality until the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway decided to link its two separate Texas lines and began construction from Coleman through Sweetwater, Snyder, and Lubbock to Clovis, New Mexico. Meanwhile the Santa Fe, under the charter of a subsidiary, the Pecos and Northern Texas, built south from Plainview to Lubbock, causing a wild celebration when the first train steamed into town on Sept. 25, 1909. Other lines soon spread through the county. The other event critical to the growth of Lubbock County, the opening of Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University), occurred in 1925. The county's population was 211,651 by 1980.

Lubbock is primarily an agricultural county. The Ogallala Aquifer was central to Lubbock County's growth; water from it was used for irrigation of cotton, sorghum, and other grain crops. By the 1980s, after a decline because of high energy costs for pumping, the county still had some 8,500 wells irrigating more than 250,000 acres. Lubbock is the wholesale trade area for 51 counties in West Texas and eastern New Mexico and is also the retailing center for much of West Texas.