Kerr County Texas map
30.06° N · 99.35° W · County seat: Kerrville · 1,107 sq mi
Kerr County is built around one river. The Guadalupe rises from springs in the far west of the county, gathers its North and South forks above Hunt, and runs east through Ingram and Kerrville in a cypress-lined valley that holds nearly every town, camp and highway in the county.
Kerrville sits in the southeast of the county where I-10, SH-16 and SH-27 meet the river. SH-39 follows the Guadalupe upstream through Ingram and Hunt to the forks.
Where Kerr County is
The county lies on the Edwards Plateau in the middle of the Hill Country, high enough that summer nights are noticeably cooler than in San Antonio. San Antonio is 68 miles southeast down I-10, Fredericksburg 32 miles northeast on SH-16 and Austin about 97 miles northeast. Six counties border it: Kimble north, Gillespie northeast, Kendall east, Bandera south, Real southwest and Edwards west.
Kerr County was created out of the Bexar District in 1856 and organized the same year. Joshua D. Brown, who had set up a shingle-making camp on the Guadalupe at the site of Kerrville, named the county for James Kerr, a fellow Kentuckian who had been a colonist and soldier in the Texas Revolution and later a congressman of the Republic. Kerr never lived here. The whole county forms the Kerrville micropolitan statistical area.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Kerrville (county seat) | City | 24,278 |
| Ingram | City | 1,796 |
Those two cities hold about half the county's residents; the rest live in unincorporated river settlements — Center Point, Hunt, Mountain Home, Comfort's western fringe — and on ranches. Kerrville's page has street-level detail: Kerrville map.
Roads
- I-10 – crosses the county northwest to southeast, entering from Kimble County and passing north of Kerrville toward Comfort and San Antonio.
- SH-16 – north to Fredericksburg, south from Kerrville through the hills to Medina and Bandera. The Kerrville Folk Festival grounds are on this road south of town.
- SH-27 – the old highway down the Guadalupe valley through Center Point to Comfort, paralleling I-10.
- SH-39 – upstream along the Guadalupe from Ingram through Hunt to the forks, with several low-water crossings.
- SH-41 – across the far northwest of the county, the high plateau route toward Rocksprings and Mountain Home.
- US-83 and SH-173 – US-83 clips the west of the county; SH-173 runs south from Kerrville toward Bandera.
Kerrville: college, hospital and folk festival
Kerrville has more institutions than a town of 24,000 usually carries, because it drew health seekers from the 1920s on and retirees after that. Schreiner University, founded as a boys' school in 1923 by rancher Charles Schreiner and now a four-year private university, sits on SH-27 at the east side of town. A Department of Veterans Affairs hospital and a state hospital are also here, and medical work is one of the county's largest employers.
The Kerrville Folk Festival has run every year since 1972 and is held at Quiet Valley Ranch, on SH-16 south of the city, stretching over several weeks of late-spring camping, stage sets and a songwriting competition. The Museum of Western Art is on a hill above town.
Summer camps are the county's other institution. Children's camps have operated on the Guadalupe above Kerrville since the early 20th century, clustered along SH-39 between Ingram and Hunt, and generations of Texas families have sent children to the same camps.
The Guadalupe and the 2025 flood
The upper Guadalupe drains a steep limestone catchment with thin soil, so rain runs straight off it. The river can go from ankle-deep to a wall of water within an hour, and the county's low-water crossings carry gauges and gates for that reason. On 4 July 2025 an extreme rainfall event over the headwaters sent a catastrophic flood down the river valley in the dark. It killed people along the river, including children at a camp, and destroyed homes, cabins and crossings between Hunt and Kerrville. Recovery and changes to flood warning in the valley continued long afterward.
Away from the river the county is ranch country. Kerr County was a centre of Angora goat and mohair production for decades, and it is also where the Texas exotic-game business took root: several large ranches west of Kerrville stock axis deer, blackbuck and other imported species alongside native whitetail, and hunting leases are a significant part of the rural economy. The Kerr Wildlife Management Area, on FM 1340 in the northwest, is a state research area used for long-running work on deer and habitat.