Crosby County was created in 1876 and organized in 1886, with its first county seat at Estacado, a Quaker colony founded in 1879 in the county’s northeast corner on a mail and stage road. Because freight hauling of materials was slow, county offices were housed in dugouts, shacks, and wagons for two years until the first courthouse was completed in 1888. In 1890 the county seat moved to Emma, named for the fiancee of R. L. Stringfellow, one of the town’s promoters, nine miles west of here, and the courthouse at Estacado was taken down, moved, and rebuilt there at a cost of $3,000, serving for 20 years. After the Crosbyton-South Plains Railroad was built in 1910 and Emma lay four miles off its route, Crosbyton won an election as the new county seat, and Julian Bassett, one of Crosbyton’s founders, donated a courthouse site. The county court then met in the schoolhouse until the present courthouse and jail were built in 1914, when the county judge was Pink Parrish and the commissioners were John K. Fullingim, W. E. McLaughlin, J. A. Noble, and R. M. Wheeler.