Colorado County Texas map
29.60° N · 96.51° W · County seat: Columbus · 973 sq mi · Central Time
Columbus sits inside a horseshoe bend of the Colorado River, and I-10 crosses the county right beside it — which makes this the point where the Houston metropolitan sprawl ends and the coastal prairie begins. It is the county everyone driving between Houston and San Antonio stops in without knowing where they are.
Centered on Columbus. I-10 and US-90 run east–west through the middle; the Colorado River enters from the northwest and loops south past Columbus toward Wharton County.
Where Colorado County is
One of the original 23 counties, created in 1836 and organized the following year, Colorado County takes its name from the river that crosses it — colorado being Spanish for coloured or reddish, a description of the silt the river carries. It should not be confused with the Colorado River of the Grand Canyon; the two are unrelated.
Five counties border it: Austin to the northeast, Wharton to the southeast, Jackson to the south, Lavaca to the southwest and Fayette to the northwest. Only 13 of its 973 square miles are water, the lowest share of any county on this stretch of the coastal plain.
By road on I-10, Columbus is about 70 miles west of Houston and about 125 miles east of San Antonio, which makes it the usual halfway stop even though the true midpoint lies further west. Sugar Land is 53 miles east in a straight line and Victoria 62 miles southwest.
Cities and towns
Three incorporated cities and nothing else — Colorado County is one of the emptier counties within 100 miles of Houston, and most of its people live on farms and ranches or in the unincorporated settlements between the towns.
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Columbus | City · county seat | 3,788 |
| Eagle Lake | City | 3,446 |
| Weimar | City | 2,065 |
Garwood, Sheridan, Alleyton, Glidden, Rock Island and Nada are unincorporated communities; Garwood gives its name to one of the Lower Colorado River Authority's irrigation divisions.
Roads and rail
- I-10 – enters from Sealy in Austin County, bypasses Columbus on the north, passes Weimar and Schulenburg's edge and continues toward Flatonia and San Antonio.
- US-90 – the pre-interstate route running parallel a mile or two south, through Alleyton, Columbus, Borden and Weimar; still the way into the towns themselves.
- US-90 Alternate – swings southeast from Columbus through Eagle Lake and Rock Island toward Wharton and Rosenberg.
- SH-71 – the diagonal from Columbus northwest through La Grange to Austin and Bastrop, and southeast to El Campo and Bay City.
- Farm-to-market roads – a dense grid links Eagle Lake, Sheridan, Garwood and Nada across the rice prairie in the south of the county, where there is no state highway for twenty miles at a stretch.
- Union Pacific's Sunset Route – the old Southern Pacific main line from Houston to San Antonio runs beside US-90, and the Glidden yard west of Columbus still serves it.
Columbus, the courthouse square and the Hanging Tree
Columbus stands on the site of a Karankawa village and then of the Mexican municipality of the same name; Austin's colonists settled here in the 1820s, and the town was burned during the Runaway Scrape in 1836 as the Texian army fell back ahead of Santa Anna. The Colorado County courthouse rebuilt on the square carries a leaded and stained-glass dome over its courtroom, and the nineteenth-century county jail still stands a few steps away.
On the square's edge stands the Live Oak known as the Hanging Tree, a spreading oak said to be several hundred years old under which district court was held in the years before the county had a courthouse — and, according to local record, under which sentences were carried out. Whatever the truth of the hangings, the tree is the town's landmark, and the square around it holds the Stafford Opera House, built by a cattleman whose ranch money paid for a two-storey theatre in a town of a few thousand people.
Eagle Lake, rice and the prairie chicken
Eagle Lake, in the county's southeast, is a natural lake on the old Colorado River floodplain and one of the larger natural freshwater bodies in Texas — a rarity in a state where nearly every lake is a reservoir. The town beside it built its reputation on waterfowl: the flooded rice fields of the coastal prairie draw enormous numbers of snow and specklebelly geese every winter, and Eagle Lake has called itself the goose hunting capital of the world since the middle of the last century.
Northeast of the town, the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge protects a remnant of the tallgrass coastal prairie that once ran unbroken from Louisiana to Mexico, and with it one of the last wild populations of Attwater's prairie chicken, a grouse reduced to a few hundred birds. The refuge's driving loop and its spring viewing of the males' booming display are open to the public. Rice, cattle and sand and gravel pits along the river make up the rest of the county's working land.