Sweetwater is named for Sweetwater Creek, a campsite for buffalo hunters in the 1870s. The Texas and Pacific (T&P) Railway reached Sweetwater in 1881, but the town’s progress was retarded by the blizzards and droughts of the 1880s that devastated the cattle industry. A raw frontier town until the twentieth century, Sweetwater revived after the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient (KCM&O) Railway arrived in 1903. Railroad shops and an International Harvester factory stimulated the town’s economy in the first half of the twentieth century, but the droughts and financial instability of the 1930s strongly affected Nolan County as elsewhere. The Army Air Force trained pilots at the city’s airfield (SL5) during World War II, one of sixty-five stations in Texas (nine in the Panhandle/South Plains region). Ranching, cotton, and oil were the mainstays of the economy in the late twentieth century, with wind farms adding a new dimension to the industrialized rural landscape in the twenty-first century.
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