Littlefield was founded by George W. Littlefield of Austin, a cattleman and banker who purchased the Yellow Horse Division of the XIT Ranch in 1901. In 1912 he established the Littlefield Lands Company to sell off part of the property for farming. Littlefield became an agricultural market town after the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway established a station here in 1913. The town became the seat of Lamb County in 1946. Littlefield’s unusual town plan has three parallel streets, XIT Drive, Phelps Avenue, and LFD Drive, which run northeast to southwest perpendicular to the rail line. They cut diagonally across the orthogonal street grid, thus creating triangulated blocks where the two systems collide. This two-block-wide by seven-block-long zone is similar to that at Pampa but is larger and stronger.
Littlefield prospered from cotton and textiles from the 1930s to 1950s. Thus its buildings are among the more modern in Texas outside the major metropolises. Urban renewal, 1960s style, touched Phelps Avenue, Littlefield’s main commercial street. To break up the blocks of angled parking in front of the stores, wavy-topped, folded plate canopies and curved brick benches were inserted at each street intersection, forming a line of concrete mushrooms extending four blocks from the railroad station to the courthouse.
Musician Waylon Jennings grew up in Littlefield in the 1940s and 1950s and began his career as a performer here while still in his teens.
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