The town of Lubbock was not founded until 1890, when it was formed from a unique merger arrangement between two smaller towns, "Old Lubbock" and Monterey.

Lubbock County is one of the oldest inhabited places in the state, if not the oldest. In the northern part of the city of Lubbock is the archeological site known as the Lubbock Lake Site, the first archeological site in Texas to be entered on the National Register of Historic Places.  There, in Yellow House Canyon, preserved in the twenty-foot wall of a dry lakebed, lies one of the very few known records of human habitation in Texas reaching back uninterrupted for at least 12,000 years.