Calhoun County Texas map
28.44° N · 96.58° W · County seat: Port Lavaca · 1,033 sq mi · Central Time
More than half of Calhoun County — 526 of its 1,033 square miles — is bay. Matagorda, Lavaca, San Antonio and Espíritu Santo bays cut the county into peninsulas, and on one of them stood Indianola, the second-busiest port in Texas until hurricanes in 1875 and 1886 destroyed it and the survivors walked away. Nothing has been built there since.
Centered on Port Lavaca. SH-35 crosses Lavaca Bay east to Point Comfort; SH-238 and SH-185 run down the peninsulas toward Indianola and Seadrift; Matagorda Island closes the bay on the Gulf side.
Where Calhoun County is
Calhoun County was created in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, out of parts of Jackson, Matagorda and Victoria counties, and named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and vice president who had pushed hard for annexation.
Five counties border it: Jackson to the north, Matagorda to the east, Aransas to the southwest, Refugio to the west and Victoria to the northwest. Most of those borders run through open water rather than across land, and Matagorda Island — a barrier island with no bridge to it — forms the county's Gulf front.
Victoria is 36 miles northwest and Corpus Christi 67 miles southwest. Houston is 117 miles northeast, far enough that Calhoun County belongs to the Victoria–Port Lavaca orbit and not to the Houston one; Port Lavaca is the centre of its own micropolitan statistical area.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Port Lavaca | City · county seat | 11,552 |
| Seadrift | City | 996 |
| Point Comfort | City | 605 |
Port O'Connor, Olivia, Long Mott, Magnolia Beach and Six Mile are unincorporated. Calhoun is one of the few Texas counties whose 2024 estimate is lower than its 2020 census count.
Roads and water routes
- SH-35 – the coastal highway, entering from Port Lavaca's north side, crossing Lavaca Bay on a long causeway to Point Comfort, and continuing northeast toward Palacios or southwest toward Refugio and Rockport.
- US-87 – north from Port Lavaca to Victoria, the county's road to the interstate system.
- SH-185 – southeast from Victoria through Bloomington and Seadrift to Port O'Connor at the tip of the peninsula.
- SH-238 – the short spur running southeast from Port Lavaca down the Indianola peninsula to Magnolia Beach and the Indianola townsite.
- The Matagorda Ship Channel – dredged from the Gulf at Pass Cavallo across Matagorda Bay to the Port of Port Lavaca–Point Comfort, it carries the county's industrial traffic; the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway crosses behind the barrier islands and passes Port O'Connor.
- No bridge to Matagorda Island – the island, and the state and federal land on it, can be reached only by boat from Port O'Connor.
Indianola
Indianola began in the 1840s as the landing where German immigrants organised by the Adelsverein came ashore for the Hill Country, and it grew into a deep-water port second only to Galveston, the seat of Calhoun County, a customs house and the terminus of a rail line inland. The United States Army landed its experimental camel corps here in 1856. On 15 September 1875 a hurricane pushed the bay across the town and killed several hundred people; Indianola rebuilt smaller, and on 19 August 1886 a second hurricane and the fire that followed finished it. The county seat moved to Port Lavaca and the site was abandoned.
What is left is a shell beach, a scatter of foundations and cisterns, a cemetery, and a granite statue of La Salle looking out over the bay — the same bay in which La Salle's ship La Belle sank in 1686 and was excavated by state archaeologists in the 1990s. SH-238 runs to it from Port Lavaca; there is no town.
Point Comfort, the bays and the birds
The county's industry sits at Point Comfort on the east side of Lavaca Bay. Alcoa built an aluminium smelter there in 1950, drawn by the ship channel and cheap gas; mercury discharged from the plant contaminated Lavaca Bay badly enough that the site became a federal Superfund listing, and the smelter has since shut down. Formosa Plastics built a very large petrochemical and plastics complex next to it in the 1980s and expanded repeatedly; it takes its process water by pipeline from Lake Texana in Jackson County and is by far the county's biggest employer and taxpayer.
The bays themselves are the other economy. Seadrift and Port O'Connor run shrimp and oyster boats and a heavy sport-fishing charter trade out into San Antonio and Espíritu Santo bays. Matagorda Island is managed as wildlife area and as part of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge complex — the wintering ground of the whooping cranes that come down from Canada each autumn — and Green Lake, in the county's northwest corner, is one of the largest natural freshwater lakes in Texas.