Caldwell County Texas map
29.83° N · 97.63° W · County seat: Lockhart · 547 sq mi
Two small towns carry Caldwell County's reputation. Lockhart, the seat, was named the barbecue capital of Texas by the legislature in 1999 and draws people off US-183 for four pits within a few blocks of its courthouse square. Luling, 15 miles southeast, sits on an oil field discovered in 1922 and paints its working pumpjacks as cartoon figures.
Lockhart sits at the centre on US-183, with Luling to the southeast where I-10 crosses the San Marcos River. SH-130 runs down the county's western side.
Where Caldwell County is
Caldwell is a small county — 235th of the 254 by total area — wedged into the gap between Austin and San Antonio on the prairie side of the I-35 corridor. Six counties touch it: Bastrop to the north, Travis northeast, Fayette southeast, Guadalupe south, Gonzales southwest and Hays west.
San Marcos is 19 miles west in a straight line, Austin 31 miles north, New Braunfels 31 miles west and San Antonio 59 miles southwest. Being inside that triangle has made Caldwell one of the faster-growing rural counties in the state: 45,883 people in the 2020 census, estimated at about 52,000 by 2024.
The county was created in 1848 out of Bastrop and Gonzales counties and named for Mathew Caldwell, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and a ranger captain. Caldwell commanded at the Battle of Plum Creek in August 1840, fought on the prairie near the present site of Lockhart — the fight that ended the Comanche raid on Victoria and Linnville.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Lockhart | City (county seat) | 14,382 |
| Luling (part) | City | 5,474 |
| Martindale | City | 1,252 |
| Uhland (part) | City | 558 |
| Mustang Ridge (part) | City | 445 |
| Niederwald (part) | City | 142 |
Four of the six incorporated places straddle a county line, and three of them — Uhland, Niederwald and Mustang Ridge — have most of their population in Hays or Travis County, which is a fair measure of how the metropolitan edge is arriving from the northwest. A sliver of San Marcos also crosses into the county. Martindale is a small town on the San Marcos River above Luling. Unincorporated communities include Maxwell, Dale, Delhi, McMahan and Fentress.
Roads
- US-183 – the north–south spine through Lockhart and Luling, north to the Austin airport and Austin, south to Gonzales and Cuero.
- SH-130 (toll) – the eastern bypass of I-35, running down the county's western side past Lockhart with an 85 mph speed limit, the highest posted limit in the United States. It ends at I-10 near Seguin.
- I-10 – crosses the southern tip at Luling, the San Antonio–Houston route.
- US-90 – the older parallel road through Luling.
- State Highway 21 – the Camino Real route through the northeast, from San Marcos toward Bastrop.
- State Highway 142 and State Highway 80 – the local links: SH-142 west from Lockhart to Martindale, SH-80 southwest from Luling toward Nixon.
Lockhart: courthouse and barbecue
The Caldwell County Courthouse stands on the Lockhart square, a limestone-and-sandstone Second Empire building from the 1890s with a mansard roof and a clock tower — one of the more elaborate small-county courthouses in Texas, and restored rather than replaced. The square around it is a Texas Main Street district and the reason Lockhart photographs the way a nineteenth-century county seat is supposed to.
The barbecue is a by-product of the same square. Kreuz Market, Smitty's, Black's and Chisholm Trail all descend from meat markets that started selling smoked beef to farmers and cattle drovers coming into town, and the 1999 legislative resolution naming Lockhart the Barbecue Capital of Texas simply confirmed an established trade. The style is Central Texas: post oak, salt and pepper, meat sold by weight on butcher paper.
Southwest of town off FM 20, Lockhart State Park has a small golf course, a swimming pool and cabins built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s on Clear Fork Creek.
Luling: oil and watermelons
Edgar B. Davis brought in the discovery well of the Luling oil field in August 1922 after a run of dry holes, and the field turned a railroad town on the San Antonio–Houston line into an oil town almost overnight. The field is still producing at low volumes, and the pumpjacks stand in front yards, beside the school and along US-183 — many of them decorated as grasshoppers, butterflies and cartoon characters by a long-running town project.
The other Luling crop is watermelon. The Watermelon Thump has been held on the last weekend of June since 1954, with a seed-spitting contest and an auction of the champion melon. The San Marcos River runs past the town's eastern side and joins the Guadalupe a few miles downstream in Gonzales County; Zedler Mill on the river in Luling is the put-in for a marked paddling trail.