Gillespie County Texas map

The county sits on the Edwards Plateau at the western end of the Hill Country, drained by the Pedernales River and its creeks. Austin is 72 miles east in a straight line, San Antonio 68 miles southeast, Kerrville 23 miles southwest and New Braunfels 65 miles southeast. Fredericksburg is far enough from all of them that the county forms its own micropolitan statistical area rather than belonging to anyone else's metro.

Six counties border it: Llano to the northeast, Blanco east, Kendall southeast, Kerr southwest, and Kimble and Mason to the northwest.

Gillespie County was created in 1848, two years after the town, out of Bexar and Travis counties, and is named for Robert Addison Gillespie, a merchant, Texas Ranger and soldier in the Mexican–American War. The 2020 population was 26,725, of whom about 11,000 lived in Fredericksburg; the 2024 estimate is roughly 28,159.

It is the only incorporated place in 1,061 square miles. The rest of the county lives on ranches and in unincorporated communities, most of them founded by the same German settlement: Stonewall on US-290 east, Harper on US-290 west, Doss and Cherry Spring to the northwest, Willow City on the Llano road, and Luckenbach, which is a dance hall, a store and a post office box that a country song made famous in 1977.

Fredericksburg's plan is worth reading on the map. Main Street was laid out wide enough to turn an ox team, the town lots were paired with ten-acre outlots on the edge of town, and families who farmed those outlots built small second dwellings in town — the Sunday Houses — so they could stay overnight for church and market. Dozens survive, one- and two-room limestone and frame cottages with an outside stair to a loft, scattered through the streets north and south of Main. At the centre of the street stands a reconstruction of the Vereins Kirche, the octagonal building that served the colony as church, school and meeting hall.

Chester Nimitz, who commanded the Pacific Fleet in the Second World War, was born in Fredericksburg in 1885 and grew up around his grandfather's hotel on Main Street. The old Nimitz Hotel, with its steamboat-shaped front, is now the anchor of the National Museum of the Pacific War, a complex of several buildings covering the entire Pacific campaign, plus a Japanese garden of peace given by the people of Japan and a combat-zone exhibit where equipment is demonstrated. It is the reason a town of 11,000 gets coach parties.

Fourteen miles east on US-290, at Stonewall, the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park takes in the LBJ Ranch on the Pedernales — the Texas White House, the reconstructed birthplace, the ranch airstrip and the family cemetery — with the Blanco County line just beyond. The state park across the river runs the visitor centre and a living-history farmstead, and Ranch Road 1, the road along the south bank, exists because the president wanted it.

Gillespie County is the centre of the Texas Hill Country AVA, and the stretch of US-290 between Fredericksburg and Johnson City carries the densest concentration of tasting rooms in the state — dozens of them within about 15 miles, with more on SH-16 south and the ranch roads. Much of the fruit is grown on the High Plains around Lubbock rather than here, but the vineyards, the wineries and the tourism are concentrated on this road.

Peaches came first. The sandy soils along the Pedernales and around Stonewall and Willow City support clingstone and freestone orchards, and the roadside stands on US-290 and SH-16 run from May into August. The other landmark is granite: Enchanted Rock, 17 miles north on RM 965, is a bare pink dome rising about 425 feet above the brush, straddling the line into Llano County, and it is the most visited natural area in the Hill Country.