Jim Wells County Texas map
27.73° N · 98.09° W · County seat: Alice · 868 sq mi
Alice is called the birthplace of Tejano music, and the claim rests on a specific address: the Ideal Records studio that Armando Marroquín started in his living room in the 1940s and that made conjunto and orquesta records for the whole of South Texas. Alice is also the service town for the oilfields around it, and the county seat of a county carved from Nueces in 1911.
Alice sits at the crossing of US-281 and SH-44 in the north half of the county. Premont is on US-281 near the southern line; Orange Grove is in the northeast corner.
Where Jim Wells County is
The county was split off from Nueces County in 1911 and named for James Babbage Wells Jr., a Brownsville lawyer and judge who for three decades ran the Democratic Party organisation across the lower Rio Grande and much of South Texas. It sits inland from Corpus Christi where the coastal plain gives way to brush.
Neighbours run round the compass: Live Oak County north, San Patricio County northeast, Nueces and Kleberg counties east, Brooks County south and Duval County west. Corpus Christi is about 43 miles east on SH-44, Laredo 86 miles southwest and McAllen 106 miles south.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Alice (county seat) | City | 17,878 |
| Premont | City | 2,452 |
| Orange Grove | City | 1,169 |
| San Diego (part) | City, mostly in Duval County | 754 |
Ben Bolt, Sandia, Coyote Acres and Alice Acres are unincorporated. Alice began as a railroad town called Bandana and then Kleberg before taking the name of Alice Gertrudis King Kleberg, Richard King's daughter, in the 1880s.
Roads
- US-281 – the north–south trunk, from Alice north to George West and I-37, south through Ben Bolt and Premont toward Falfurrias and the Rio Grande Valley. Interstate 69C is planned along this corridor.
- SH-44 – the east–west route, from Corpus Christi through Robstown and Alice and on west to San Diego and Freer. Alice's four-lane bypass carries it round the north of town.
- SH-359 – southwest from Alice toward Hebbronville and Laredo.
- SH-141 – east from Alice to Kingsville and US-77.
- FM-624, FM-665 and FM-716 – the connectors to Orange Grove, Sandia and the Duval County line.
Ideal Records and Tejano music
Armando Marroquín began recording local musicians in Alice in the mid-1940s because the major labels had lost interest in Spanish-language records during the war, and jukeboxes in his part of Texas had nothing new to play. With Paco Betancourt of San Benito he built Ideal Records into the dominant label of the Texas–Mexican borderlands. Ideal's catalogue carried Narciso Martínez, the accordionist who set the pattern for conjunto; Beto Villa, who put a dance-band saxophone section behind the same music and effectively created the orquesta tejana; and the duet Carmen y Laura, one half of which was Marroquín's wife.
That combination — accordion conjunto and horn-driven orquesta recorded in the same small town for the same audience — is the root of what later became Tejano. Alice keeps the association through the South Texas Music Walk of Fame downtown and the annual Tejano Music Festival.
Oilfield service and Box 13
Alice grew as a supply point for the gas fields of Duval, Brooks and Jim Hogg counties and never stopped being one. Pipe yards, workover rig companies, sand and chemical suppliers and trucking outfits line US-281 and the SH-44 bypass, and the Eagle Ford boom after 2009 pushed activity up again. Cattle, grain sorghum and hunting leases work the land between the fields.
The county also has a place in national political history. In the 1948 Democratic primary runoff for the U.S. Senate, a late-amended return from Precinct 13 in Alice — Box 13 — added 202 votes, nearly all for Lyndon Johnson, and gave him the nomination by 87 votes statewide. The ballots were later reported destroyed, and the episode has been argued over ever since; the machine that produced the return was the one run out of neighbouring Duval County.