GOMEZ – The railroad changed everything. Long before the open plains were filled with rows of crops, they were brimming with the hopes of prosperity from families who flocked to Gomez. It was the first settlement in Terry County, just southwest of Lubbock in the Texas South Plains. Businesses opened, a cotton gin ushered in agriculture production, and a vote was coming up to name a county seat. The founders, in 1904, boasted Gomez was the “metropolis of the plains.”