Menard County Texas map
30.89° N · 99.86° W · County seat: Menard · 902 sq mi
The San Saba River runs the length of Menard County, and almost everything in the county's history sits on its banks: a Spanish presidio built in 1757, a U.S. Army fort at the river's headwaters, an irrigation ditch dug in the 1870s, and the town of Menard itself. With 1,962 residents in 2020, this is one of the emptiest counties in the Concho Valley.
Menard sits on the San Saba River in the middle of the county. The presidio ruins are just west of town; Fort McKavett is upriver near the western county line.
Where Menard County is
Menard County has seven neighbors, more than most counties this size. Concho County is north and McCulloch County northeast; Mason County is east; Kimble County is south and Sutton County southwest; Schleicher County is west and Tom Green County northwest.
San Angelo is 53 miles northwest, the closest city of any size. Kerrville and Fredericksburg are both about 72 miles southeast across the Hill Country, and Abilene is 108 miles north. I-10 passes about 40 miles south through Kimble and Sutton counties.
The town and the county
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Menard | City (county seat) | 1,347 |
Menard is the county's only incorporated place, and it holds more than two thirds of the population. The rest of the county is ranchland: sheep, goats and cattle on the Edwards Plateau, with wool and mohair long a bigger part of the local economy than row crops. Fort McKavett, Hext and Callan are unincorporated settlements.
Roads
- US-83 – the main north–south route, entering from Junction in the south and running north through Menard toward Eden and Ballinger.
- US-190 – crosses the county east to west, from Brady in McCulloch County toward Eldorado.
- US-377 – runs northeast to Brady and southwest to Junction, sharing pavement with US-83 for part of the way.
- SH-29 – begins at Menard and runs east through Mason, Llano and Burnet to Georgetown, one of the longest continuous east–west state highways in central Texas.
The Presidio de San Sabá
About two miles west of Menard, on the north bank of the San Saba River, stand the reconstructed walls of the Presidio de San Sabá — formally Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas. Spain built it in 1757 to protect Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá, a Franciscan mission a short distance downriver that was intended to bring the Lipan Apache into the Spanish system. The plan failed quickly. In March 1758 a large force of Comanche and allied Norteño warriors destroyed the mission and killed two of its priests. A punitive expedition north the following year was beaten back, and the presidio held on in an increasingly hopeless position until it was abandoned in 1768.
The stone ruins survived on the ranchland, and parts of the walls and towers were rebuilt in the 1930s. It is the most substantial Spanish colonial military site in this part of Texas, and the reason the Menard county line encloses a piece of eighteenth-century frontier history that has nothing to do with the county's own 1858 founding.
Fort McKavett and the river
Twenty-three miles west of Menard, near the head of the San Saba, the U.S. Army built Fort McKavett in 1852 as one of a line of posts guarding the road to El Paso. It was abandoned, reoccupied after the Civil War, and finally closed in 1883; the limestone buildings became a village and are now a state historic site with one of the best-preserved fort layouts in Texas.
Between the fort and the town, the San Saba is a clear spring-fed stream. Farmers dug an irrigation ditch from it in the 1870s to water fields around Menard, and the ditch is still part of the town's landscape. The county has essentially no standing water — the Census records under a square mile of it in 902 — so the river is the whole water story here.