La Salle County Texas map
28.35° N · 99.10° W · County seat: Cotulla · 1,495 sq mi
La Salle County is 1,495 square miles of Brush Country with 6,664 people and one interstate running through the middle of it. When the Eagle Ford shale was drilled hardest, this county and its neighbours were the centre of it, and Cotulla's motel rooms were the hardest to book in Texas.
I-35 crosses the county from northeast to southwest through Cotulla and Encinal. The Nueces River runs past Cotulla; the Frio joins it from the northwest.
Where La Salle County is
Cotulla is almost exactly halfway down I-35 between San Antonio, 83 miles northeast, and Laredo, 61 miles southwest. Frio County is north, Atascosa northeast, McMullen east, Duval southeast, Webb south and Dimmit west.
The county was created from Bexar County in 1858 and organized in 1880, and is named for René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the French explorer whose ill-fated 1685 colony on the Texas coast gave France a claim to the region. The seat is named for Joseph Cotulla, the Polish-born rancher who gave land for a townsite when the railroad came through in the early 1880s.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Cotulla | City (county seat) | 3,724 |
| Encinal | City | 539 |
Between them the two cities hold about two-thirds of the county. Artesia Wells, Fowlerton, Millett and Los Angeles are unincorporated settlements, most of them strung along the interstate or the old rail line.
Roads
- I-35 – the NAFTA corridor, northeast to San Antonio and southwest to Laredo and the busiest land border crossing in the United States. Truck traffic on this stretch is constant.
- SH-44 – begins at I-35 in Encinal and runs east through Freer toward Corpus Christi.
- SH-97 – east from Cotulla through Fowlerton toward Jourdanton.
- FM 468, FM 624 and FM 1582 – the ranch and oilfield roads that carry most of the county's local traffic.
A state highway visitor centre sits beside I-35 south of Cotulla, one of the few services between San Antonio and Laredo.
The Eagle Ford core
The Eagle Ford shale runs in a belt from the Mexican border northeast toward East Texas, and La Salle County sits in the part of it that produces oil rather than dry gas. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing turned the county into one of the state's leading oil producers after 2010. County tax rolls, road damage, water demand and rents all rose together; when prices fell the rigs left as fast as they came. Well pads, tank batteries, gathering lines and flare stacks are now permanent features of the brush.
Before the shale, this was ranching country and it still is — cattle, and paid hunting leases for white-tailed deer, quail, dove and javelina. The state's Chaparral Wildlife Management Area lies on the Dimmit County line west of Artesia Wells.
Cotulla and Lyndon Johnson
In the 1928–29 school year a twenty-year-old Lyndon B. Johnson, breaking off his studies at Southwest Texas State, came to Cotulla to teach and serve as principal at the Welhausen School, which taught the town's Mexican-American children. He spent his own money on playground equipment and pushed the students hard. Johnson returned to the year again and again in later life, most famously in the March 1965 speech to Congress in which he introduced the Voting Rights Act, telling the chamber that he had never expected to have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students.
The Nueces River, which the Republic of Texas and Mexico both once claimed as the boundary between them, flows past Cotulla on its way southeast toward McMullen County and Choke Canyon.