SUDAN, TEXAS. Sudan is at the junction of U.S. Highway 84, Farm roads 298, 303, and 1843, and the Santa Fe Railroad, in west central Lamb County. The area was once on school land granted to the county in 1892, then part of the 77 Ranch, owned by S. B. Wilson and Wilson Furneaux. The school lands were sold in 1893, then passed to Wilson and Furneaux in 1916. The town developed in 1917-18 with a hotel and service from the Santa Fe Railroad, which had built a branch line from Lubbock to Texico, New Mexico, in 1913. The land company manager and first postmaster, P. E. Boesen, suggested the town's name in 1918. A gin was built in 1922 and a bank established a year later. The town was incorporated in 1925, when the population was 600, up from a population of only fifteen in 1920. The first of several grain elevators was also erected in 1925 and the Sudan News began publication. The population was 1,014 in 1930, 1,336 in 1950, 976 in 1970, and 1,091 in 1980. In 1990 it was 983. The population reached 1,039 in 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Vincent Matthew Peterman, Pioneer Days: A Half-Century of Life in Lamb County and Adjacent Communities (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1979). Evalyn Parrott Scott, A History of Lamb County (Sudan, Texas: Lamb County Historical Commission, 1968).

William R. Hunt