Duval County Texas map
27.68° N · 98.50° W · County seat: San Diego · 1,795 sq mi
Duval County is 1,795 square miles of South Texas brush with 9,831 people in it and three small towns, none of them larger than 3,000. It is named for a man who was shot at Goliad in 1836, its wealth has come out of gas wells since the 1930s, and for half of the twentieth century it was run as a single political machine.
San Diego is at the eastern edge on SH-44; Freer is the crossroads town in the middle where SH-44 meets SH-16. Benavides is south of San Diego on SH-359.
Where Duval County is
The county was laid out in 1858 from parts of Live Oak, Nueces and Starr counties but was not organized until 1876. It is named for Burr Harrison DuVal, a Kentuckian who commanded a company under Fannin and was among the men executed in the Goliad massacre in March 1836.
It sits inland, halfway between Laredo and Corpus Christi, with seven neighbours: McMullen County north, Live Oak County northeast, Jim Wells County east, Brooks County southeast, Jim Hogg County south, Webb County west and La Salle County northwest. Laredo is about 61 miles southwest, Corpus Christi 68 miles east and San Antonio 120 miles north.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| San Diego (county seat, part) | City, small part in Jim Wells County | 2,998 |
| Freer | City | 2,460 |
| Benavides | City | 1,187 |
Concepción, Realitos, Ramirez and Rios are unincorporated. San Diego grew from a mid-nineteenth-century ranching settlement on San Diego Creek and is one of the older continuously occupied places in the brush country; Benavides was named for the Benavides ranching family, and Freer only appeared in the 1930s.
Roads
- SH-44 – the east–west route, from Alice through San Diego to Freer and on toward Laredo, and the busiest road in the county.
- SH-16 – north–south through Freer, north toward Tilden and south to Hebbronville in Jim Hogg County.
- US-59 – clips the northwestern corner between Freer and Laredo on the future I-69W corridor.
- SH-359 – southeast from San Diego through Benavides toward Hebbronville.
- SH-285 – east from Realitos to Falfurrias.
- SH-339, FM-716, FM-1329 and FM-2295 – the ranch connectors between them.
Brush, gas and salt
This is the heart of the Texas brush country: mesquite, blackbrush, guajillo and prickly pear over deep sand, grazed as cattle range and leased for white-tailed deer, quail and javelina hunting. Ranch holdings run large, and hunting leases are a serious part of the county's income.
Freer was created by a drilling boom. The Government Wells and Piedras Pintas fields opened around 1930 and turned an empty crossroads into a town within a few years; gas and condensate production has continued in the county ever since, and the more recent Eagle Ford activity reaches its northern edge. The county overlies the Piedras Pintas salt dome, which has been studied as a site for underground hydrogen storage. Freer's annual rattlesnake roundup, held since the 1960s, is the town's other export.
The Duval County machine
From the 1910s until the 1970s Duval County politics were controlled by the Parr family — Archer Parr, elected county judge and then state senator, and after him his son George Parr, known as the Duke of Duval. The machine delivered near-unanimous county votes for its chosen candidates and controlled county contracts, school jobs and law enforcement.
Its statewide significance came in 1948, when returns from the Parr organisation's area, including the disputed Box 13 in Alice in Jim Wells County, gave Lyndon Johnson an 87-vote margin in the Democratic Senate primary runoff. George Parr was convicted of mail fraud in the 1930s and pardoned, was investigated repeatedly afterwards, and in 1975, facing a federal prison sentence for tax evasion, died by suicide on his ranch. State takeovers of the county's school district and finances followed in the years after.