Frio County Texas map
28.87° N · 99.11° W · County seat: Pearsall · 1,135 sq mi
Frio County straddles I-35 halfway between San Antonio and Laredo, in the sandy Brush Country where peanut fields and oil pumpjacks share the same ground. It takes its name and its water from the Frio River, which crosses the western half of the county on its way to the Nueces.
I-35 runs diagonally across the county through Pearsall and Dilley. The Frio River enters from the northwest and leaves at the southern county line.
Where Frio County is
Pearsall is 53 miles southwest of San Antonio on I-35 and about 95 miles northeast of Laredo on the same road. Medina County is north, Atascosa east, La Salle south, Dimmit southwest, Zavala west and Uvalde northwest.
The Legislature cut Frio County out of Atascosa, Bexar and Uvalde counties in 1858; it was organized in 1871. Frío is Spanish for cold, a name the river earned from its clear spring-fed headwaters up on the Edwards Plateau — by the time it reaches Frio County it runs intermittently through sand and gravel.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Pearsall | City (county seat) | 8,776 |
| Dilley | City | 3,648 |
Both cities sit on I-35, 15 miles apart. Moore, at the US-57 junction in the northeast, Bigfoot on SH-173 — named for the ranger William "Bigfoot" Wallace, who lived there — and Derby southwest of Pearsall are unincorporated.
Roads
- I-35 – northeast to San Antonio, southwest through Cotulla to Laredo and the border; exits serve Moore, Pearsall and Dilley.
- US-57 – enters from the west and ends at I-35 near Moore; westbound it runs to Eagle Pass.
- SH-85 – east–west through Dilley, west toward Batesville and Crystal City, east toward Charlotte in Atascosa County.
- SH-173 – across the northeast corner through Bigfoot, north to Devine and Hondo.
- FM 140 and FM 1582 – the ranch roads linking Pearsall to Dilley and to the La Salle County line.
Peanuts, oil and the Eagle Ford
The deep sands around Pearsall grow peanuts, and the town has claimed the title of peanut capital for generations; a monument on the courthouse square marks it. Vegetables, grain sorghum, corn and cattle fill out the farm economy, with irrigation from the Carrizo aquifer.
Oil arrived in the 1930s with the Pearsall field, an Austin Chalk producer that kept the county in drilling work for decades. Frio County then sat on the western end of the Eagle Ford shale play, and after 2008 horizontal drilling brought a second boom: truck traffic, man camps, sales-tax receipts and a spike in road repair bills. Activity has cooled from the peak, but the county remains an oil and gas producer.
The Frio River corridor
The Frio River enters the county southwest of Pearsall and runs south to join the Nueces in La Salle County. This is not the swimming-hole Frio of Concan and Garner State Park upstream — down here it is a brush-lined channel that runs low or dry for stretches, feeding the water table that makes the irrigated fields possible. The bottomland carries mesquite, huisache and live oak, and the ranches along it are hunting country: white-tailed deer, quail and dove leases are a real part of the local economy every autumn.
Dilley is also the site of a large federal immigration detention centre opened in 2014, one of the county's biggest employers.