Building in Hunt County
Hunt County is in northeastern Texas. Greenville, the county seat and largest town, lies on Interstate Highway 30 fifty-one miles northeast of Dallas. The county covers 840 square miles of the Blackland Prairie, a vast plain with shallow stream valleys and rounded divides.
Elevation rises from 450 feet in the southeast to 700 feet in the northwest. Upland soils are mostly loamy or clayey and loamy, while bottomland soils are clayey and subject to flooding. January minimums average 33° F and July maximums 93°. Rainfall averages forty-three inches a year, and the growing season ranges from 218 to 247 days.
Settlement began in 1839, and the county was formed in 1846 from Fannin and Nacogdoches counties and named for Memucan Hunt, the first Texas minister to Washington. With no navigable rivers or railroads, a self-sufficient farm economy took hold. The first train reached Greenville in October 1880 on the East Line and Red River Railroad. By 1900 the county had 5,946 farms, and cotton was its main cash crop.
NOAA’s Storm Events Database lists 73 hail reports in Hunt County from 2016 to 2025, 59 of them an inch across or larger, with stones up to 2.5 inches. The same records show 32 damaging thunderstorm wind reports, with gusts up to about 85 mph, and 2 tornadoes. That is why a patio cover’s roof panels, fasteners and posts here are chosen for hail and wind, not only for shade.