Welcome
El Paso County is the westernmost county in Texas and the last census figures I could find place its population at just under 870,000, the ninth most populous county in Texas. Most of Texas uses the Central Time Zone but El Paso, it's next- door neighbor, Hudspeth and a little piece of Culberson County are in the Mountain Time Zone. The headquarters for Fort Bliss are in El Paso but the fort stretches across the state line into New Mexico. Fort Bliss provides the largest contiguous tract (1,500 sq mi) of restricted airspace in the continental United States, including White Sands (about 20 miles north).The Rio Grande Valley in this area has been irrigated since prehistoric times and produces bountiful harvests of cotton, pecans, and alfalfa. The county seat is also called El Paso and both are short for "El Paso del Norte", which is Spanish for "the North Pass" and was the recorded name of the pass as early as 1610AD. The pass was actually carved through the Franklin Mountains by the Rio Grande. El Paso County was created in 1850 (from the huge Santa Fe County, which included a lot of present-day New Mexico) but was not organized until 1871.
Like Fort Bliss, the city of El Paso was traditionally located in two states but also in two countries. The bedroom communities of Anthony and Chaparral are north of the state line, La Union, Sunland Park and Santa Teresa are mostly west of it and Ciudad Juarez is located south of the rio. Until relatively recent times, families traveled across the border unhindered. Many of the residents of El Paso were born in New Mexico or Juarez and many of the folks in Juarez and New Mexico are in a similar circumstance. Sometimes the places could be difficult to name so be sure to look both north and south of the border and in Doña Ana and Otero counties as well as El Paso.
