Kinney County Texas map
29.35° N · 100.42° W · County seat: Brackettville · 1,366 sq mi
Kinney County has 1,366 square miles and 3,129 people, and its history runs through one place: Fort Clark, the cavalry post at Las Moras Springs that Brackettville grew up beside. The county reaches from the Edwards Plateau escarpment down to a short frontage on the Rio Grande.
Brackettville sits on US-90 in the middle of the county. The southwest tip touches the Rio Grande below Spofford.
Where Kinney County is
Val Verde County lies west, Edwards north, Uvalde east, Zavala southeast and Maverick south. The southwestern corner meets the Rio Grande, so a short stretch of the county line is the international border with Coahuila.
Brackettville is 29 miles east of Del Rio on US-90 and 44 miles north of Eagle Pass. San Antonio is about 116 miles east. The county was created from Bexar County in 1850 but not organized until 1874, and it is named for Henry Lawrence Kinney, the state senator and land speculator who founded Corpus Christi.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Brackettville | City (county seat) | 1,343 |
| Spofford | City | 44 |
Spofford, on the rail line in the southern part of the county, is one of the smallest incorporated cities in Texas. The rest of the population lives at Fort Clark Springs — a residential community inside the old post — and on ranches. There is no town at all across the northern half of the county.
Roads
- US-90 – the only through route, entering from Uvalde in the east and running west through Brackettville to Del Rio.
- US-277 – clips the southwest corner between Del Rio and Eagle Pass.
- SH-131 – south from US-90 near Brackettville toward Eagle Pass, meeting US-277 in Maverick County.
- FM 674 – north from Brackettville toward Kickapoo Cavern and the Edwards Plateau ranch country.
No interstate and no four-lane divided highway crosses Kinney County.
Fort Clark and Las Moras Springs
The Army chose the site in 1852 because of Las Moras Springs, a large spring at the foot of the escarpment that still fills a swimming pool at the old post. Fort Clark guarded the road to El Paso and the Mexican border for nearly a century, closing after the Second World War. Its limestone barracks, officers' quarters and parade ground survive as Fort Clark Springs, a private community with a guest lodge, and the buildings make one of the most complete frontier forts left in Texas.
Black Seminole scouts served out of Fort Clark from 1870, tracking for the cavalry in the Rio Grande campaigns; four of them received the Medal of Honor. Their descendants settled at Brackettville, and the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery south of town is a state historic site.
Alamo Village
North of Brackettville on FM 674, rancher James T. Shahan had a full-scale replica of the Alamo and a period San Antonio street built in the late 1950s so that John Wayne could film The Alamo on Texas ground. The set stayed up afterwards and served dozens of westerns and television productions over the following decades, along with a tourist operation of its own. It closed to the public in 2010, but Alamo Village remains the reason a great many people know the name Brackettville.
For open country, Kickapoo Cavern State Park straddles the Kinney–Edwards county line north of town, with two large dry caves and a summer bat flight.