Mentone
Mentone, Loving County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Smallest County Seat in Texas Mentone Only town in Loving County -- last organized, most sparsely populated (both in total and per square mile) county in Texas. Established 1931 and named for an earlier town (10 miles north) which legend says was named by a French surveyor-prospector after his home on the Riviera. With population of 42, Mentone has no water system. (Water is hauled in.) Nor does it have a bank, doctor, hospital, newspaper, lawyer, civic club or cemetery. There are only two recorded graves in county. Some Indian skeletons, artifacts are found. Oil, farming, cattle country. (1967)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Mentone is the seat of Loving County, the last-organized and most sparsely populated county in Texas, and in 1931 it took its name from an earlier town said to have been christened by a French surveyor after his home on the Riviera. With a population of just forty-two and no water system—water is trucked in—the town has no bank, doctor, newspaper, or cemetery. Its country runs on oil, cattle, and farming amid the scattered traces of earlier inhabitants.
Why it matters
Mentone embodies the extreme sparseness of the West Texas frontier, a county-seat town that survives against the emptiness of the arid plains.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Loving County
Mentone, TX
Loving County was carved from Tom Green County in 1887 and organized in 1893, in the last decades when the arid Trans-Pecos of West Texas was being fenced, ranched, and settled. It honors Oliver Loving (1812–1867), the pioneering cattleman whose long drives helped open northern markets to Texas herds after the Civil War. Mentone, the county seat, anchors what remains one of the most sparsely populated counties in the United States.
Oliver Loving, C.S.A.
Mentone, TX
Kentucky-born Oliver Loving came to Texas in 1845 to farm, freight, and deal in cattle, and in 1858 drove a herd all the way to Chicago—the first time Texas cattle reached a northern market. With Charles Goodnight after the Civil War, in which he served as a Confederate beef contractor, he blazed the route to New Mexico that bears their names. Wounded by Comanches on the trail in 1867, he died of gangrene at Fort Sumner; Goodnight packed his body home for burial, and Loving County was named in his honor in 1887.
Route of Old Butterfield Stagecoach Road
Mentone, TX
From 1858 to 1861 the Butterfield Overland Mail rolled across this ground, offering for the first time a combined passenger-and-mail link from the Atlantic to the Pacific. John Butterfield's company ran Concord coaches and wagons behind some 1,350 mules and horses, switching to hardier mules west of Fort Belknap to make his teams less tempting to raiders. A one-way journey of 2,700 miles took about twenty-five days and cost $200, with armed passengers and crew and stations spaced from twelve to over a hundred miles apart — this stretch marking a 113-mile run along the Pecos with no team change on the inaugural trip.
Goodnight-Loving Trail
Mentone, TX
This marker recalls the legendary Goodnight-Loving Trail, the cattle route pushed from the Fort Griffin–Dodge City road across New Mexico and into Colorado in the mid-19th century. It honors Oliver Loving (1812–1867), remembered as the first Texan to trail cattle north to distant markets, whose partnership with Charles Goodnight helped open the great era of Texas cattle drives.