Victoria County Texas map
28.80° N · 96.97° W · County seat: Victoria · 889 sq mi · Central Time
Victoria County has exactly one incorporated place inside its 889 square miles, and it holds 72 percent of the county's people. Martín De León laid out the town on the Guadalupe River in 1824 and named it for Guadalupe Victoria, the first president of Mexico; it became one of the three original Mexican municipalities in Texas, alongside Béxar and Goliad, and the county that grew around it has never needed a second town.
Victoria sits at the county's centre where US-59, US-77 and US-87 converge. The Guadalupe River enters from the northwest and leaves toward the southeast corner and San Antonio Bay.
Where Victoria County is
The county sits on the coastal plain about 30 miles inland from the bays, on the seam between the Gulf Coast and South Texas. Six counties touch it: Lavaca to the north, Jackson northeast, Calhoun southeast, Refugio south, Goliad southwest and DeWitt northwest.
Victoria itself is two miles from the county's centre point. Everything else is a drive: Corpus Christi is 73 miles southwest in a straight line, San Antonio 102 miles northwest, Sugar Land and the Houston side 99 miles northeast. That equal distance from three metro areas — and none of them close — is why Victoria supports its own television market, hospital system and airport rather than feeding into someone else's.
The county was one of the original 23 created when the Republic of Texas organised itself in 1836, taking the boundaries and the name of De León's colony. The Guadalupe River, which the town was built beside, runs diagonally across the county from the northwest corner to the southeast and carries the drainage of the Hill Country down to San Antonio Bay.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Victoria | City (county seat) | 65,535 |
One incorporated city, and no other. The rest of the county's roughly 25,800 residents live in unincorporated communities — Bloomington, Inez, Nursery, McFaddin, Placedo, Telferner, Dacosta — and on farm and ranch land.
Roads
- US-59 – the Houston–Laredo corridor, entering from Jackson County on the northeast and leaving southwest toward Goliad and Beeville. It is being rebuilt as I-69 section by section along this route.
- US-77 – the north–south route, down from Hallettsville and Yoakum and on south through Refugio toward Kingsville and the Rio Grande Valley.
- US-87 – southeast from Victoria to Port Lavaca and the bay, northwest toward Cuero and San Antonio.
- SH-185 – the diagonal southeast toward Bloomington, Seadrift and the coast.
- Loop 463 – the ring road around Victoria, carrying US-59 and US-77 traffic past the city rather than through it.
- Spur 91 – the short link between Loop 463 and the airport on the northeast side.
The barge canal and the port
Victoria is an inland town with a saltwater port. The Victoria Barge Canal, dug in the 1960s, runs roughly 35 miles southeast from the city to meet the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway near the head of San Antonio Bay, which puts barge traffic within reach of the chemical plants and the grain elevators on the city's south side without any of it touching the Guadalupe River proper. The Port of Victoria at the canal's head is run by a county navigation district and handles chemicals, petroleum products, grain and steel.
The petrochemical corridor along the canal and the DuPont and Formosa plants down the road in Calhoun County are the reason a county of 91,319 people has industrial employment out of proportion to its size, and the reason the Victoria Regional Airport — a Second World War airfield northeast of town — still has a runway long enough for it.
The old town on the Guadalupe
Victoria's original 1824 plan was Spanish in form: a central plaza with the streets on a grid around it. De León's town survived the Texas Revolution, the collapse of the Mexican colonies and a long 19th century as a cattle and cotton centre, and the downtown that resulted has one of the larger concentrations of Victorian commercial and residential architecture on the coastal plain, with several National Register districts. Riverside Park runs along the Guadalupe on the city's south edge and holds the county's zoo and its rose garden.
Two campuses sit in town: Victoria College, a public two-year school opened in 1925, and the University of Houston–Victoria, which shares the site. Together they make the city the higher-education centre for a wide stretch of coast with no other four-year campus between Corpus Christi and Houston.