Brazoria County Texas map
29.17° N · 95.44° W · County seat: Angleton · 1,608 sq mi · Central Time
Brazoria County covers 1,608 square miles between the Brazos and the San Bernard rivers, and it does it without a single interstate highway. Two things dominate the map: the Dow Chemical works at Freeport, the largest chemical manufacturing site in the western hemisphere, and a coast of marsh and prairie so undeveloped that three national wildlife refuges sit inside the county.
Centered on Angleton. SH-288 runs north to Houston; SH-35 crosses east–west through Alvin and Angleton; the Brazos comes down from the northwest to Freeport.
Where Brazoria County is
One of the original 23 counties of the Republic, Brazoria was created in 1836 and named for the river port of Brazoria, which was itself a contraction of the Brazos and the mouth-of-the-river country around it. This was the heart of Stephen F. Austin's first colony — the Old Three Hundred took land along these bottoms before there was a Texas.
Five counties border it: Harris to the north, Galveston to the northeast, Matagorda to the southwest, Wharton to the west and Fort Bend to the northwest. The southeastern edge is open Gulf shoreline running from San Luis Pass southwest to the mouth of the San Bernard, and 245 of the county's square miles are water.
Straight-line distances put Houston 41 miles north of the county's center, Galveston 40 miles east, Pasadena 39 miles northeast and Sugar Land 33 miles northwest.
Cities and towns
Populations are the 2020 census count for the part of each place inside Brazoria County. Pearland straddles the line into Harris and Fort Bend counties.
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Pearland (part) | City | 111,799 |
| Lake Jackson | City | 28,182 |
| Alvin | City | 27,057 |
| Angleton | City · county seat | 19,429 |
| Freeport | City | 10,696 |
| Clute | City | 10,614 |
| Manvel | City | 9,906 |
| Iowa Colony | Village | 8,137 |
| Richwood | City | 4,783 |
| West Columbia | City | 3,637 |
| Sweeny | City | 3,622 |
| Brazoria | City | 2,870 |
| Jones Creek | Village | 1,974 |
| Danbury | City | 1,667 |
Lake Jackson, Clute, Freeport, Richwood, Oyster Creek and Surfside Beach together form the Brazosport cluster at the river's mouth. Manvel and Iowa Colony are the fastest-growing places in the county, both on Pearland's southern edge.
Roads
- SH-288 – the Houston connection, four lanes with tolled express lanes from Loop 610 south through Pearland and Manvel to Angleton, then on to Lake Jackson and Freeport as SH-288B.
- SH-35 – the coastal-prairie highway: northeast through Alvin toward Pearland and Houston, southwest through Angleton, West Columbia and Sweeny toward Bay City.
- SH-36 – north from Freeport and Brazoria through Rosenberg toward the Brazos valley.
- SH-332 – the Brazosport spine, running from SH-288 through Lake Jackson and Clute to the beach at Surfside.
- SH-6 – enters from Alvin and runs southeast toward Hitchcock and the Galveston County line.
- SH-99, the Grand Parkway – the outer Houston ring, planned and partly built across the county's northern edge near Manvel.
- FM-521 and FM-1462 – the farm roads through the rice and cattle country between SH-288 and the Brazos, linking Rosharon, Angleton and Alvin.
Dow, Freeport and the diverted river
Dow Chemical came to Freeport in the 1940s to extract magnesium from seawater for the war, stayed for the salt domes, the brine and the deep-water harbour, and built out a plant complex that is now the company's largest anywhere. It made the county's whole southern economy: Lake Jackson was laid out in the 1940s as a Dow company town on a plan by the architect Alden B. Dow, which is why its streets bend in curves and two of them are named This Way and That Way.
Port Freeport works the old channel of the Brazos. The river itself was cut into a new mouth southwest of the town in the 1920s so the original channel could be kept as a deep-water harbour, and the Brazos River Diversion Channel is why the map shows the river bending abruptly away from the port it built. Freeport now handles container, bulk and LNG traffic, and Phillips 66 runs a refinery inland at Sweeny.
Refuges, the first capital and a rainfall record
The Texas Mid-Coast National Wildlife Refuge Complex covers three separate units, two of them here — Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on the bays southeast of Angleton and San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge on the county's southwestern boundary. They protect coastal marsh, salt prairie and freshwater ponds along the central flyway, and the Christmas Bird Count circles based on them regularly rank among the highest species totals in the country. Sea Center Texas at Lake Jackson runs a state fish hatchery and aquarium for the same bay system.
Columbia — now West Columbia — served as the capital of the Republic of Texas for a few months in late 1836, where the first Congress met and Sam Houston was inaugurated. The Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site nearby preserves the sugar plantation later owned by Governor James Hogg. And in July 1979 the town of Alvin recorded about 43 inches of rain in 24 hours as Tropical Storm Claudette stalled overhead — the largest 24-hour rainfall ever measured in the United States. Alvin is also where Nolan Ryan grew up and returned to.