Seventy miles east of El Paso, Texas, is a lonely turnoff to one of the most isolated towns in Texas. This town, Dell City, has about 350 people and it was founded in 1948, so it is a relatively new town.
In 1947, geologists were exploring this area in northern Hudspeth County looking for underground oil reserves to exploit. What they found instead led to the settling of the valley and the creation of a town. Instead of finding oil reserves, a vast, subterranean aquifer of water was discovered. Very shortly after news of this discovery got out, people began moving to the area to claim their plot of land so they could establish their own farm. It is one of the most recent "rushes" or "booms" in the United States, but this "rush" was not the result of mining or an oil boom. It was because a vast amount of water was discovered in a parched and barren desert. Almost as soon as it was founded, Dell City boomed. At its peak, Dell City had 13 bars, 5 stores, a drugstore, 2 banks and a John Deere tractor dealership. The population peaked at about 900 in the 1960 Census. The most commonly grown crops in this new farming area were onions, tomatoes and lettuce. Today, onions and tomatoes are still grown, but the lettuce crop has been replaced with alfalfa. A movie theater even opened in the fledgling town, the El Capitan Theater. The theater closed for good in the early 1970s and served as a residence for awhile before being abandoned entirely.
Today, the downtown business district lies mostly abandoned and derelict. The population of Dell City has dwindled to about 300, one-third of what it was in 1960. There is one small grocery store in town with gas pumps across South Main Street in which a person can only purchase gas with a credit card or debit card. These are the only gas pumps over a huge area. There are no convenience stores in town.
The school district now has only 67 students in grades K through 12 and the high school only had 19 students this past school year. The school's six-man football team, the Dell City Cougars, only played 5 games last fall before they were forced to cancel the rest of the season due to lack of players. Their prospects for fielding a team this coming fall look grim. The Dell City Independent School District is paid by the Alamogordo School District in New Mexico to educate the handful of students that live in New Mexico, which is just a few miles north of Dell City. The state border is only 4 miles away. Since there are no other schools within an hour's drive of Dell City, I am sure the local schools will stay open as long as there are people living in the area.
There are still alot of farms in the Dell City area, but these farms are the only reason for Dell City's existence.
Ironically, the very thing that created Dell City in the first place, vast underground water reserves, is also going to be the death knell for the town in the very near future. This is because rapidly growing El Paso, 70 miles to the west, is going to need the Dell Valley's water to sustain its rapidly expanding population. El Paso's principal water supply, the Rio Grande, is rarely more than a trickle these days and is often dry. It also has to serve the needs of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. El Paso's two water supply reservoirs in New Mexico, Elephant Butte Lake and Caballo Lake are both more than half a century old and were constructed when El Paso was much smaller than it is now.
So, the very thing that created Dell City in 1948 is also going to be the thing that kills the town in the very near future, leaving nothing but an abandoned townsite and abandoned farms left to be reclaimed by the Chihuahuan Desert.
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