GRIFFITH, TEXAS (Cochran County). Griffith is on State Highway 114 some seventy miles west of Lubbock and less than two miles east of the New Mexico state boundary in northwestern Cochran County. Henry D. Chipley, an associate of Morton Smith, who was the land agent for much of Cochran County, established the town as Oasis in 1934. The townsite, on what had been the Campbell Ranch, was intended by Chipley to be a green place in the desert. He had previously attempted, without success, to establish a town, called Chipley, in the eastern part of the county. Oasis had one store, which served oilfield workers. In 1950 Oasis was renamed for Karl Griffith, a local landowner and banker who built a grain elevator there that year. Other businesses included a cotton gin, built by W. A. Dykes in 1937 and owned by Griffith, a store and service station, and a few houses. Though in 1982 the Griffith population was reported as twenty-five, by 1990 no population figures were available for the community. The population was twelve in 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Elvis Eugene Fleming, Texas' Last Frontier: A History of Cochran County (Morton, Texas: Cochran County Historical Society, 1965).

Leoti A. Bennett