Medina County Texas map
29.35° N · 99.11° W · County seat: Hondo · 1,334 sq mi
Medina County was settled in 1844 by Alsatians recruited to Texas by Henri Castro, and their first town, Castroville, still stands as a compact grid of steep-roofed limestone and cypress houses on the Medina River. The county runs from the Hill Country edge in the north down onto the flat farming plain west of San Antonio.
Hondo is on US-90 in the centre of the county. Castroville is 20 miles east on the same road; Medina Lake fills the northeastern corner and I-35 clips the southeast through Devine and Natalia.
Where Medina County is
The county lies directly west of Bexar County and is part of the San Antonio metropolitan area. San Antonio is 37 miles east, Kerrville 48 miles north, New Braunfels 64 miles northeast and Eagle Pass 95 miles southwest. Six counties border it: Bandera north, Bexar east, Atascosa southeast, Frio south, Zavala southwest and Uvalde west.
Medina County was created from Bexar County in 1848, four years after Castro's colonists arrived, and is named for the Medina River, which in turn carries the name of the 16th-century Spanish engineer Pedro de Medina. The Balcones Escarpment crosses the north of the county: above the line the ground rises into the Hill Country, below it the county is level cropland running toward South Texas. Corn, wheat, sorghum, cotton and peanuts are grown on the flat, much of it under irrigation from the Medina Valley system.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Hondo (county seat) | City | 8,387 |
| Devine | City | 4,318 |
| Castroville | City | 2,966 |
| Natalia | City | 1,197 |
| LaCoste | City | 1,078 |
| Lytle (part) | City | 791 |
Lytle straddles the line with Atascosa and Bexar counties; the figure is the Medina County share. A sliver of the city of San Antonio also crosses the county line. D'Hanis, Yancey, Mico and Rio Medina are unincorporated communities.
Roads
- US-90 – the main east–west road, from San Antonio through LaCoste, Castroville, Hondo and D'Hanis and on to Sabinal and Uvalde. It carries the Union Pacific main line alongside it for most of the county.
- I-35 – crosses the southeastern corner through Lytle, Natalia and Devine on the run from San Antonio to Laredo.
- SH-173 – north–south from Bandera through Hondo to Devine and I-35.
- SH-132 – links Castroville south to Natalia and the interstate.
- SH-211 – a north–south connector near the Bexar County line in the east.
- SH-16 – clips the northeastern corner in the Medina Lake country.
Castroville: the Little Alsace of Texas
Henri Castro held an empresario contract from the Republic of Texas and recruited settlers from Alsace and the German-French border country. The first party reached the Medina River in September 1844 and laid out Castroville on a grid of narrow lots. The builders used local limestone and cypress in the manner of home, and roughly a hundred of those early houses survive, which is why the town centre is a National Register historic district — an unusually intact 1840s townscape for Texas. St. Louis Catholic Church stands on the hill above them. The Alsatian dialect the colonists brought was still spoken by some residents into the late 20th century, and the town keeps an Alsatian festival each year.
The Landmark Inn, a 19th-century inn and gristmill complex on the river at the edge of the old town, is now a state historic site with a small museum and rooms let to visitors.
Medina Lake and Hondo's airfield
Medina Lake sits in the canyon country of the northeast, on the Medina River at the Bandera County line. The concrete arch dam that impounds it was completed in 1913 for an irrigation company and was among the largest dams in the United States at the time; the reservoir still supplies irrigation water to farms on the plain south of the escarpment, and its level swings dramatically with drought. Mico and Lakehills are the settlements on its shores.
Hondo grew as a railroad town on the Southern Pacific and became a flight-training centre during the Second World War, when the Army ran a navigation school at Hondo Army Airfield. The field is now a municipal airport with unusually long runways for a town of 8,000, used for general aviation and industry. Hondo is also known for the sign at its city limits telling drivers this is God's country and not to drive through it like hell.