Pampa is the county seat of Gray County and is the principal city of the Pampa Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes both Gray and Roberts counties in Texas. It was formerly known as "Glasgow", then "Sutton", and then "Pampa" after the suggestion of George Tyng, manager of the White Deer Lands Company, as a reminder of the Argentine Pampas when it was laid out as a station on the Southern Kansas Railway in the summer of 1887. With a total land area of 9.0 square miles, it is located at the junction of U.S. Highway 60 and State highways 70, 152, and 273, in the northwestern part of the county. The first resident was the railroad section foreman, Thomas H. Lane, who settled his family in a half-dugout near the boxcar station. The town voted to incorporate on February 17, 1912, with a commission-manager government. By the 1920s, Pampa was linked by rail to Hemphill County and Clinton, Oklahoma, through the combination of two similarly-named companies, the Clinton, Oklahoma, and Western Railroad Company and the Clinton-Oklahoma-Western Railroad Company of Texas. The discovery of oil in 1926 caused Pampa to grow and was assured in 1927, when Godfrey L. Cabot, head of Cabot Carbon in Boston, established the first of several carbon black plants at Pampa. Also, in 1928, Pampa supplanted Lefors as a county seat after a special election. During World War II, the US Army Air Forces Training Command operated the Pampa Army Air Field that was in operation from 1942 to 1945 and is located near the intersection of SH 152 and FM 1474, about 10 miles east of the town. Pampa reached a population of 17,475 in 2017. It also has an airport, Perry Lefors Field Airport (PPA) with 2 Runways.
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