Matagorda County Texas map
28.78° N · 96.00° W · County seat: Bay City · 1,612 sq mi · Central Time
Just under a third of Matagorda County is water — 519 of its 1,612 square miles — because the county line runs out across Matagorda Bay and down the barrier peninsula that closes it off from the Gulf. Two incorporated cities serve the whole of it, the Colorado River reaches salt water inside it, and a two-unit nuclear station sits on a cooling reservoir in the middle of the rice fields.
Bay City sits on the Colorado River in the county's north. Matagorda Bay opens to the southwest, Palacios stands on Tres Palacios Bay, and the thin strip along the bottom is the Matagorda Peninsula.
Where Matagorda County is
The county fills the middle of the Texas coast between the Brazos and the bays of the Coastal Bend. Only four counties touch it: Brazoria to the northeast, Wharton northwest, Jackson west and Calhoun southwest across Matagorda Bay. Everything south is Gulf.
No city on this site is inside the county. Victoria is 61 miles west of the county's centre point in a straight line, Sugar Land 62 miles northeast, Houston 78 miles northeast and Galveston 81 miles up the coast. There is no interstate: the fastest way in from Houston is US-59 to Wharton, then SH-60 south.
Matagorda was one of the 23 original counties of the Republic in 1836. The name is Spanish for a thick or heavy brush and refers to the canebrakes that once grew along this stretch of shoreline. The town of Matagorda, at the river mouth, is older than the county and was one of the ports of Stephen F. Austin's colony; Bay City took the county seat in the 1890s when the railroad came through.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Bay City | City (county seat) | 18,058 |
| Palacios | City | 4,399 |
Two incorporated cities and roughly 13,800 people living outside them, in unincorporated communities such as Matagorda, Sargent, Wadsworth, Blessing, Markham, Van Vleck, Collegeport and Midfield.
Roads
- SH-35 – the coastal highway, entering from Brazoria County on the northeast, passing through Bay City and running southwest past Blessing and Palacios toward Port Lavaca and Rockport.
- SH-60 – the road down from Wharton and US-59, through Bay City and Wadsworth, ending at the town of Matagorda and the Colorado River mouth.
- SH-71 – the northwestern route, from Bay City up through El Campo toward Columbus and Austin.
- SH-111 – the western link from Palacios and Blessing up toward Edna and Jackson County.
- FM-457 – the road south off SH-35 to Sargent and the Gulf beach at the county's eastern end.
The Colorado River mouth and the peninsula
The Colorado River crosses the county from north to south, past Bay City and Wadsworth, and reaches salt water at the town of Matagorda. Its channel was cut straight through to the Gulf in the twentieth century, so the river now empties directly to the sea beside the head of Matagorda Bay rather than silting into it. The Lower Colorado River Authority runs the Matagorda Bay Nature Park at that junction, with a beach, jetties, campsites and a small research and education centre.
From there the Matagorda Peninsula runs southwest for tens of miles as a narrow sand barrier between the bay and the Gulf, with no road on it beyond the first few miles and no development past the park. It is reached on foot, by boat, or by driving the beach where conditions allow — one of the least built-up stretches of Texas shoreline. The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway runs the length of the bay behind it, crossing the Colorado at Matagorda.
Palacios, on the west side of the county, keeps a working shrimp and oyster fleet in Tres Palacios Bay and one of the larger Vietnamese-American fishing communities on the coast. Marsh at the county's southwestern edge is protected in the Mad Island wildlife management area, a wintering ground for ducks, geese and shorebirds that regularly turns up among the top counts in the country on the annual Christmas bird census.
The South Texas Project
Near Wadsworth, south of Bay City on SH-60, two pressurised-water reactors sit on a site built around a large man-made cooling reservoir fed from the Colorado. The South Texas Project's units came online at the end of the 1980s and between them make it one of the largest nuclear generating stations in the United States; it is jointly owned by a group of Texas municipal and investor-owned utilities. The plant is the county's biggest taxpayer and employer by a wide margin, which is why a county of 36,255 people has school and hospital districts funded well beyond its size, and its cooling reservoir is stocked and open to the public for fishing.