Wharton County Texas map
29.28° N · 96.23° W · County seat: Wharton · 1,094 sq mi · Central Time
The county seat is not the biggest town here. El Campo, out on the southwestern prairie, counted 12,356 people in 2020 against Wharton's 8,654, and the two have split the county's business between them for a century. What holds them together is flat black land: 1,086 square miles of coastal prairie farmed in rice, cotton, grain sorghum and cattle, with the Colorado River winding through the middle of it.
Wharton sits on the Colorado River where US-59 crosses it; El Campo is 15 miles southwest along the same highway and East Bernard is in the northeastern corner.
Where Wharton County is
The county lies inland from the middle coast, southwest of the Houston metro. Six counties border it: Austin to the north, Fort Bend northeast, Brazoria east, Matagorda southeast, Jackson southwest and Colorado northwest.
From the county's centre point, Sugar Land is 43 miles northeast in a straight line, Victoria 57 miles southwest and Houston 62 miles northeast. US-59 runs the diagonal between the two nearest metros, which puts Wharton and El Campo about an hour from Houston's outer suburbs and makes the county a commuting fringe at its northeastern end and farmland everywhere else.
Wharton County was created in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, out of parts of Colorado, Jackson and Matagorda counties. It is named for two brothers, William Harris Wharton and John Austin Wharton, both officers in the Texas Revolution — William served the Republic as its first minister to the United States, and both were dead before the county carrying their name existed.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| El Campo | City | 12,356 |
| Wharton | City (county seat) | 8,654 |
| East Bernard | City | 2,222 |
Three incorporated cities. The other 18,000-odd residents live in unincorporated places such as Louise, Hungerford, Boling, Egypt, Danevang, Glen Flora and Lissie, and on the farms between them.
Roads
- US-59 – the spine, running southwest from Fort Bend County through East Bernard, Wharton, El Campo and Louise toward Victoria. Sections are being rebuilt to interstate standard and signed as I-69, and both Wharton and El Campo now have bypasses carrying the through traffic around town.
- US-90 Alternate – the older road running roughly parallel through East Bernard and Hungerford toward Rosenberg.
- SH-60 – the north–south route, from Wharton south past Boling toward Bay City and the coast, north toward Wallis.
- SH-71 – crosses the western county from El Campo northwest toward Columbus and Austin.
- FM-102, FM-442, FM-1160 and FM-1301 – the farm roads that carry most of the county's rice and grain traffic between the fields, the driers and the two towns.
The Colorado River and the rice prairie
The Colorado enters the county from Colorado County on the northwest and loops southeast past Glen Flora and Wharton on its way to Matagorda Bay. Wharton was built at a river crossing, and the bends of the Colorado are the only relief in the county — the land on either side of it is prairie so level that it can be flooded field by field.
That flatness plus water from the river is what made this rice country. Canal companies began pulling Colorado River water onto the prairie around the turn of the twentieth century, and Wharton County has been among the leading rice-producing counties in Texas ever since, with drying and storage elevators at El Campo, Louise and Danevang. Cotton, grain sorghum, corn and cattle share the ground; the rice fields left in stubble and shallow water each winter draw large numbers of geese and ducks, and goose hunting is a small seasonal industry of its own.
Danevang, west of El Campo, was settled in the 1890s by Danish immigrants and still keeps a small museum of that colony — one of the few Danish farming settlements in Texas.
Wharton and El Campo
Wharton keeps the courthouse, the county's oldest neighbourhoods and Wharton County Junior College, a public two-year school that draws from the whole of the middle coast. The town is also where the playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote grew up; the small Gulf Coast town he wrote about again and again under the name Harrison is Wharton, and the family house he used as a setting stands near the square.
El Campo grew up around the railroad on the open prairie — the name is Spanish for "the field", from the cattle camps that preceded the town — and it became the larger of the two by serving the rice and cotton country around it. Its main street runs beside the track, and the older business district is a National Register district of early twentieth-century brick storefronts.