DeWitt County Texas map
29.08° N · 97.36° W · County seat: Cuero · 911 sq mi
DeWitt County — the name is written with a capital W and no space — is Guadalupe River bottom and post-oak ranch country between Gonzales and Victoria. Cuero built its reputation on turkeys and its annual Turkey Trot; then, after 2010, the oil window of the Eagle Ford shale turned a county of under 20,000 people into one of the largest crude producers in Texas.
Cuero sits on the Guadalupe where US-183 and US-87 cross. Yorktown is southwest on SH-72, Nordheim south of that, and Yoakum straddles the Lavaca County line at the northeast corner.
Where DeWitt County is
The county lies on the inland edge of the coastal plain, roughly halfway between San Antonio and the Gulf. Five counties border it: Lavaca to the northeast, Victoria southeast, Goliad south, Karnes southwest and Gonzales northwest.
The Guadalupe River enters from Gonzales County, swings past Cuero and leaves toward Victoria; its bottomland timber is the only heavy woods in an otherwise open county of post oak, mesquite and improved pasture. Victoria is 29 miles southeast in a straight line, San Antonio 72 miles northwest, Austin 85 miles north-northwest and Corpus Christi 89 miles south.
DeWitt County was created in 1846, in the first legislature after statehood, out of parts of Goliad, Gonzales and Victoria counties. It is named for Green DeWitt, the empresario whose Mexican-era colony was centred on Gonzales and covered much of this ground. Cuero, on the railroad, became the seat in the 1870s after the town of Clinton lost the courthouse; the building on the Cuero square dates from the 1890s.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Cuero | City (county seat) | 8,144 |
| Yoakum (part) | City | 2,062 |
| Yorktown | City | 1,814 |
| Nordheim | City | 331 |
Only four incorporated places, and one of them is mostly in another county: Yoakum's larger half lies over the line in Lavaca County, and its leather works and meat market are on that side. Yorktown was settled by German immigrants in the 1840s on the Indianola–San Antonio road, and Nordheim, further south, is a small German-Czech farm town. Westhoff, Thomaston, Meyersville, Hochheim and Arneckeville are unincorporated communities scattered on the FM roads.
Roads
- US-183, running with US-77 Alternate – the north–south route through Cuero, up to Gonzales and Luling one way, down to Goliad and Refugio the other.
- US-87 – the diagonal, northwest from Cuero toward Stockdale and San Antonio, southeast to Victoria.
- State Highway 72 – west from Cuero through Yorktown toward Kenedy and Three Rivers; it became a heavy oilfield truck route after 2010 and has been widened in places.
- State Highway 119 – northeast from Nordheim across the middle of the county toward Yoakum.
- Farm to market roads – a dense grid fans out from Cuero to the Guadalupe crossings, Westhoff, Meyersville, Hochheim and the oilfield leases in the west of the county.
Turkeys, cattle trails and a feud
Cuero was one of the largest turkey-raising and turkey-shipping towns in the country in the early 20th century. Birds were walked into town from the surrounding farms and driven down the main street to the dressing plants and the railroad, and from 1912 the drive was turned into a public event: the Turkey Trot. It survives as Turkeyfest each October, including a long-running race between Cuero's turkey and one from Worthington, Minnesota, the two towns having both claimed the title of turkey capital.
Before the turkeys came the cattle. Herds gathered on the coastal prairie were pointed north from around Cuero on the feeder routes into the Chisholm Trail, and the town keeps a museum to that trade. The same unsettled decades produced the Sutton–Taylor feud, which ran through DeWitt County from the late 1860s into the 1870s, pulled in John Wesley Hardin on the Taylor side, and is usually counted among the longest and deadliest family feuds in Texas history.
What the Eagle Ford did
The Eagle Ford shale crosses South Texas in bands: gas in the southwest, condensate in the middle, oil along the northeastern edge. DeWitt sits in the part that produces the most valuable mix, and from about 2010 drilling rigs, gathering lines and gas processing plants arrived quickly. Within a few years the county was among the top crude oil producers in Texas — output on a scale entirely out of proportion to its 19,824 people.
The visible effects are on the roads and in the towns. SH-72 and the FM roads carry truck traffic they were not designed for; Cuero and Yorktown gained hotels, workforce housing, pipe yards and sales tax revenue, and the school districts gained a tax base. Drilling activity rises and falls with the oil price, but the infrastructure — compressor stations, tank batteries, the pipelines running southeast toward the coast — is now a permanent layer on the county map.