Gonzales County Texas map
29.46° N · 97.49° W · County seat: Gonzales · 1,070 sq mi
The Texas Revolution started here. On 2 October 1835 settlers at Gonzales refused to give back a small bronze cannon lent to them by the Mexican government, flew a flag reading "Come and Take It" and fired it at the dragoons sent to collect it. The town sits where the San Marcos River joins the Guadalupe, and both rivers still run through the county.
Gonzales sits at the confluence of the Guadalupe and San Marcos rivers in the county's centre-west. Waelder is on I-10 in the northeast, Nixon and Smiley on US-87 in the southwest.
Where Gonzales County is
The county lies southeast of the Austin–San Antonio corridor, on the post-oak and prairie country between the two cities and the coastal plain. Seven counties border it: Caldwell to the north, Fayette northeast, Lavaca east, DeWitt southeast, Karnes southwest, Wilson west and Guadalupe northwest.
San Marcos is 40 miles northwest in a straight line, New Braunfels 41 miles northwest, Victoria 54 miles southeast, Austin 58 miles northwest and San Antonio 60 miles west. It is one of the original counties created in 1836 by the Republic of Texas and organized the following year, taking its name from the town, which had in turn been named in 1825 for Rafael Gonzales, then governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas.
Gonzales County was carved down over the following decades to help form Caldwell and other neighbours. Population has been close to flat for a century — 19,653 at the 2020 census — and the county's economy runs on cattle, poultry and, in the south, the Eagle Ford Shale.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Gonzales | City (county seat) | 7,161 |
| Nixon (part) | City | 2,354 |
| Waelder | City | 933 |
| Smiley | City | 482 |
Four incorporated places hold about 55 percent of the county's people; the rest live on ranches and in unincorporated communities such as Belmont, Leesville, Ottine, Cost, Dewville and Harwood. Nixon, on US-87 in the southwest, straddles the line into Wilson County and is the trade town for the poultry and oilfield country on that side. Waelder, in the northeast, grew as a stop on the railroad and now sits beside I-10. Smiley is a farming town between the two.
Roads
- US-183 – the north–south route through Gonzales, north to Luling and the Austin airport, south to Cuero and Goliad.
- US-90A – the road into Gonzales from the northeast, splitting off US-90 near Waelder and running through Belmont to the courthouse square.
- I-10 and US-90 – cross the northeastern corner together through Waelder and Harwood, San Antonio to Houston.
- US-87 – the southwestern diagonal from Nixon and Smiley toward Stockdale and Floresville.
- SH-97 – east–west across the middle, from Waelder through Gonzales toward Bebe and Leesville.
- SH-80 – northwest from Gonzales through Belmont and Luling toward San Marcos.
- SH-304 – the northwestern road toward Rosanky and Bastrop.
The first shot of the revolution
Mexican authorities had lent Gonzales a small cannon in 1831 for defence against Comanche raids. In September 1835, with relations breaking down, a detachment of about a hundred dragoons was sent from Béxar to retrieve it. The colonists stalled, buried the gun, gathered volunteers from surrounding settlements and on 2 October crossed the Guadalupe and opened fire, under a white banner with a black cannon and the words "Come and Take It". Casualties were almost nil, but the skirmish is treated as the opening engagement of the Texas Revolution.
Gonzales kept its part in the war after that. In late February 1836 it sent 32 men into the besieged Alamo, the only relief force to reach the mission; all died there on 6 March. Sam Houston's army mustered at Gonzales, learned of the Alamo's fall and burned the town as it retreated east in the Runaway Scrape. The cannon itself is displayed at the Gonzales Memorial Museum, and a battleground site sits southwest of town off SH-97.
The county seat rebuilt around a grid of public squares laid out in the Spanish manner, and the 1890s Gonzales County Courthouse, a red-brick Romanesque Revival building with a clock tower by architect J. Riely Gordon, stands on one of them.
Two rivers and Palmetto
The Guadalupe enters from the northwest and the San Marcos comes down from Caldwell County; they meet just above Gonzales, and the combined river leaves the county to the southeast toward DeWitt. Both are paddling rivers, and the stretch below the confluence is run regularly.
Palmetto State Park lies on the San Marcos River at Ottine, in the county's northwest, reached from US-183 by Park Road 11. The park protects an oxbow swamp fed by artesian seeps where dwarf palmetto grows in dense stands, an environment more typical of the Gulf coast than of the dry prairie a few miles away. It is a well-known birding stop, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the refectory and water tower there in the 1930s.