Brewster County Texas map
29.81° N · 103.25° W · County seat: Alpine · 6,193 sq mi
Brewster County is the largest county in Texas at 6,193 square miles — bigger than Connecticut, and bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together — with 9,546 people in it and one incorporated town. Its southern third is Big Bend National Park, and it measures roughly 115 miles from its northern line down to the Rio Grande.
Alpine sits in the far northwest on US-90. The Chisos Mountains and the Rio Grande are at the bottom of the map; the Glass Mountains are at the top.
Where Brewster County is
The county was cut from Presidio County in 1887 and named for Henry Percy Brewster, a secretary of war for the Republic of Texas. It occupies the bend itself: the Rio Grande wraps around its southern end for well over a hundred miles, making Mexico — the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila — the county's longest neighbor.
On the Texas side there are only four: Pecos County to the north, Terrell County east, Presidio County west and Jeff Davis County northwest. Marfa is 26 miles west of Alpine on US-90, Del Rio 145 miles southeast, Odessa 150 miles northeast and Midland 166 miles northeast.
Towns and settlements
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Alpine (county seat) | City — the only one in the county | 6,035 |
Alpine holds roughly two-thirds of the county's population and is the largest town for a hundred miles in any direction. Everything else is unincorporated: Marathon, 30 miles east on US-90, the turn-off for the park's north entrance; Terlingua and Study Butte at the southwestern corner, grown out of the quicksilver mining camps that worked cinnabar deposits from the 1890s until after the Second World War; and Lajitas on the river below them. Terlingua's ghost-town cemetery and its two competing November chili cook-offs draw more visitors than the mines ever employed.
Roads
- US-90 – the northern route, entering from Marfa, passing through Alpine and Marathon and running east toward Sanderson and Del Rio. The Union Pacific main line and Amtrak's Sunset Limited follow it; Alpine is the only Amtrak stop between Del Rio and El Paso.
- US-385 – south from Marathon about 40 miles to Persimmon Gap, the national park's north entrance, and on to Panther Junction.
- SH-118 – south from Alpine roughly 80 miles to Study Butte and the park's west entrance; north from Alpine to Fort Davis and the Davis Mountains.
- US-67 – northwest out of Alpine toward Marfa, where it turns south for Presidio and the border.
- SH-223 – a short connector on the south side of Alpine.
Big Bend National Park
Big Bend National Park, established in 1944 and covering 801,163 acres, lies entirely within Brewster County and takes up most of its southern third. Inside it the Chisos Mountains rise as an isolated range to Emory Peak at 7,825 feet, the high point of the county and of any national park in Texas, and the Rio Grande cuts the Santa Elena, Mariscal and Boquillas canyons through limestone walls up to 1,500 feet high.
Park headquarters is at Panther Junction, 70 miles south of Marathon and about 105 from Alpine, and there are no services on those roads. The Boquillas Crossing port of entry near Rio Grande Village is a passenger-only border crossing to the village of Boquillas del Carmen; it reopened in 2013 after being closed for eleven years.
Alpine, Sul Ross and the Glass Mountains
Alpine sits at about 4,475 feet in a basin between the Davis Mountains and the Del Norte range, which is why it is cooler than the desert below it and why the county seat ended up there rather than on the river. Sul Ross State University, opened in 1920 on the hill above town, gives the county a four-year university, a research herbarium and the Museum of the Big Bend.
The northern end of the county is a different landscape: the Glass Mountains, a Permian reef complex whose rock strata are important enough to geology that two ages of the Permian period are named from features here — the Roadian, from Road Canyon, and the Wordian, from the Word Ranch in the Glass Mountains. Between the mountains, the land is ranch country in blocks of tens of thousands of acres.