Neither Spanish, Mexican, nor Texas Republic pioneers explored what is now Ector County. Even the Comanches never stayed in the area because it had no dependable surface water sources. Odessa was established when the Texas and Pacific Railway was built through the future Ector County in 1881 and set up a watering station, naming it from some notional connection to the Ukrainian port. Land sales attracted few buyers. In 1886, the Odessa Land and Townsite Company, chartered in Zanesville, Ohio, tried again. It promised to keep the town liquor-free and subsidize anyone who would construct a college here. An exceptionally severe drought of the late 1880s and early 1890s stifled business, however, and the company went bankrupt in 1889.
When Ector County was split from Tom Green County in 1891, Odessa was designated the county seat. After oil was struck in the county in the 1920s, Odessa grew as a commercial center, and by the 1940s there were more than 2,000 producing oil wells in Ector County. As a result of industrialization during World War II, petrochemical processing was introduced to Odessa, turning oil and gas waste products into rubber and other chemicals. In the 1960s, El Paso Natural Gas and General Tire together built the biggest inland petrochemical plant in the United States.
Odessa and Midland, each with a population in excess of 100,000 in the early twenty-first century, are 22 miles apart. Of the two, Midland is known as the white-collar city, Odessa as the blue-collar city. Even so, Odessa was home to architects Peters and Fields and J. Ellsworth Powell in the mid-twentieth century, and it contains the campus of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
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