Texas Town Named The Smallest Town In The Entire State
By Dani Medina
March 29, 2023
You've read about the richest town in Texas, but what about the smallest? Reader's Digest compiled a list of the smallest town in every state and it really puts things into perspective!
To put this list together, the magazine used the official 2019 Census. More specifically, Reader's Digest used data about "incorporated towns," rather than Census Designated Places, which are town-like areas that aren't incorporated, meaning it has legal municipal boundaries, a charter from the state and local laws and government.
The smallest town in America is Carbonate, Colorado, with a population of 0. Yes, zero! The ghost town is a historic mining site that "features only a handful of old cabins on a beautiful stretch of countryside in the mountains near Glenwood Springs and the White River National Forest." About 10 years ago, property owners voted to keep Carbonate as an incorporated town.
In Texas, the smallest town is Los Ybanez with a population of 19. Here's what Reader's Digest said about this small town:
Everything’s bigger in Texas—except this tiny town. With just 19 residents, it’s the smallest incorporated town in the state. According to Texas Monthly, a man named Israel Ibanez bought some old houses in the west Texas community for migrant workers in 1980. He and his wife, Mary, incorporated in 1983 in order to avoid the “dry” laws of the county and instead allow liquor sales through town laws so they could set up a beer store. Today, though, many of the houses are boarded up.