Edwards County Texas map

The county occupies the western Edwards Plateau, at the point where the Hill Country stops being green and starts turning into West Texas. The tableland is high, flat and thin-soiled on top, cut on its southern and eastern sides by steep canyons that carry the headwater draws of the Nueces, the West Nueces, the Frio and the South Llano.

Seven counties surround it: Sutton to the north, Kimble northeast, Kerr east, Real and Uvalde southeast, Kinney south and Val Verde west.

Nothing large is close. Del Rio is 56 miles southwest in a straight line, Kerrville 70 miles east, Fredericksburg 88 miles northeast, San Angelo 102 miles north and San Antonio 116 miles southeast. The county is in the 23rd congressional district, the enormous border district that runs from here to El Paso.

The legislature marked the county out in 1858 but there were not enough people to organize a government until 1883. It is named for Haden Edwards, the empresario whose land grant around Nacogdoches ended in the Fredonian Rebellion of 1826 — a man who never had anything to do with this part of Texas. The county was cut from the vast original territory of Bexar County.

Rocksprings is the only incorporated place, and it holds well over half of everybody in the county. It stands on the open plateau at the junction of US-377 and SH-55, laid out around a square, with the school, the courthouse, a bank, a grocery and the fuel stop that most travellers on this route depend on.

Barksdale, 22 miles southeast on SH-55 in the Nueces canyon, is the second settlement, and Carta Valley on US-277 to the southwest and Vance on RM 337 in the east are little more than named crossroads. Everything else is ranch headquarters reached by cattle guard.

The town has been rebuilt once. On 12 April 1927 a tornado destroyed most of Rocksprings and killed dozens of people in a community of only a few hundred, one of the deadliest storms in Texas history relative to the size of the town it hit.

Northeast of Rocksprings, reached by FM 2691 off SH-55, the plateau opens into a vertical shaft roughly 350 feet deep — a collapsed cavern with a mouth about 50 feet across that drops straight to a rubble cone on the floor. It is the largest single-chamber cavern known in Texas and a National Natural Landmark.

Millions of Mexican free-tailed bats roost in it from spring through autumn, and the evening emergence, when the column spirals up out of the hole, is the reason most visitors come. The site is a state natural area with no public road access: tours leave from the Devil's Sinkhole Visitor Center on the square in Rocksprings, by reservation, and the shaft itself is fenced and gated. Nobody descends it except researchers and permitted cavers.

The plateau's thin soil and browse suit goats better than cattle, and for much of the twentieth century Edwards County was among the leading Angora goat and mohair producers in the United States — Rocksprings advertised itself as the Angora Goat Capital of the World, and the mohair warehouse was the town's main business. The industry shrank sharply after federal wool and mohair incentive payments ended in the 1990s, and the county's population has fallen with it; the 2024 estimate, about 1,383, is lower than the 2020 count.

Sheep, goats and cattle still run on the ranches, alongside white-tailed deer and exotic game leases, which now provide a large share of ranch income. Water comes from wells and from the springs in the canyon heads; the county lies over the western end of the Edwards–Trinity aquifer that the plateau is named for, and the streams that start here — the Nueces, the Frio and the Llano — supply country far downstream that gets more rain than this does.