Jackson County Texas map
28.96° N · 96.59° W · County seat: Edna · 856 sq mi · Central Time
Jackson County lost its first county seat twice over. Texana, at the junction of the Navidad and Lavaca rivers, was a busy river port until the railroad went around it in the 1880s and the town emptied; a century later the Palmetto Bend Dam put the site under Lake Texana. The railroad's own town, Edna, took the courthouse and still has it.
Centered on Edna. US-59 crosses northeast to southwest through Edna and Ganado; Lake Texana lies just southeast of Edna on the Navidad; SH-35 runs along the county's southern side.
Where Jackson County is
Jackson began as a Mexican municipality in 1835 and became one of the original 23 counties of the Republic of Texas in 1836. It is named for Andrew Jackson, then serving his second term as president of the United States and a figure many of the Texian colonists expected to help them.
Six counties surround it: Colorado to the north, Wharton to the northeast, Matagorda to the southeast, Calhoun to the south, Victoria to the southwest and Lavaca to the northwest. The county reaches tidewater only at its southern tip, where the Lavaca River runs down toward Lavaca Bay.
Victoria is the nearest city of any size, 27 miles southwest. Sugar Land is 73 miles northeast, Houston 92 miles northeast and Corpus Christi 94 miles southwest, all straight-line distances — Jackson County sits in the gap between the two coastal metropolitan areas.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Edna | City · county seat | 6,000 |
| Ganado | City | 1,973 |
| La Ward | City | 178 |
Vanderbilt, Lolita, Francitas, Cordele and the site of old Texana are unincorporated. Between them the three incorporated places hold barely half the county's 14,988 residents.
Roads and the Macaroni Line
- US-59 – the main road, running southwest from Wharton through Ganado and Edna to Victoria; it is being rebuilt to interstate standard as I-69, and signed sections already carry both numbers.
- SH-35 – crosses the southern part of the county between Palacios and Port Lavaca, the coastal alternative to US-59.
- SH-111 – northwest from Edna through the Navidad bottoms toward Hallettsville in Lavaca County.
- SH-172 – south from Ganado through La Ward and Vanderbilt to SH-35 near the Calhoun County line.
- FM-234, FM-616 and FM-1862 – the farm roads that carry most of the county's rice and cattle traffic.
The towns themselves are railroad towns with unusual names. In 1881 Count Joseph Telfener began building the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway west from Rosenberg toward Victoria using Italian labourers, which earned it the nickname the Macaroni Line, and he named the new stations along it for members of his family — Edna, Inez, Louise and Vanderbilt among them. The line never got further than Victoria, but the names stuck and the county seat moved from Texana to Edna to sit on it.
Lake Texana and the water business
Palmetto Bend Dam, finished in 1980 on the Navidad River a few miles southeast of Edna, created Lake Texana — roughly 11,000 surface acres of open water in a county that had none. The reservoir is operated by the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority, and it exists mainly to sell water: it supplies the industrial plants at Point Comfort in Calhoun County, and a pipeline carries Lake Texana water more than a hundred miles southwest to Corpus Christi, which is why a small farming county's reservoir matters to a city of 300,000.
The lake's name is the county's own memorial. Texana, laid out in the 1830s at the meeting of the Navidad and the Lavaca, was the seat of government and a landing for steamboats up from Lavaca Bay; when the railroad bypassed it the population left within a decade, and the townsite lies partly beneath the reservoir. The river authority runs the parks and campgrounds on the west shore, and the lake's flooded timber makes it a well-known bass and crappie water.
Rice, cattle and the coastal prairie
The land here is flat coastal prairie broken by the wooded bottoms of the Navidad and the Lavaca. It is rice country — Jackson is consistently among the top rice-producing counties in Texas — worked in rotation with cattle pasture, grain sorghum, cotton and corn. The flooded fields draw the same enormous winter goose and duck concentrations that made the neighbouring prairie counties famous with hunters, and lease hunting is a real part of the farm economy.
Oil and gas fields work the southern half of the county, and the pipeline corridors feeding the petrochemical plants at Point Comfort and Victoria cross it. There is no city over 6,000 people, no interstate yet, and no university; the county's growth of a few hundred people between 2020 and the 2024 estimate is about what it has managed each decade.