Karnes County Texas map
28.91° N · 97.85° W · County seat: Karnes City · 754 sq mi
Karnes County has been mined twice. Uranium was found in these sands in the 1950s and made the county the centre of the Texas uranium industry; sixty years later the Eagle Ford shale turned it into one of the highest-producing oil counties in the state. Population in 2020 was 14,710.
US-181 runs northwest to southeast through Karnes City and Kenedy. The San Antonio River crosses the county from the northwest past Falls City.
Where Karnes County is
Karnes City is 53 miles southeast of San Antonio and 52 miles west of Victoria, with Corpus Christi 81 miles to the southeast. Gonzales County lies northeast, DeWitt east, Goliad southeast, Bee south, Live Oak southwest, Atascosa west and Wilson northwest.
The county was organized in February 1854 out of parts of Bexar, DeWitt, Goliad, Gonzales and San Patricio counties. It is named for Henry Karnes, the cavalry officer who scouted for the Texian army in the Revolution and died young in 1840.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Karnes City | City (county seat) | 3,586 |
| Kenedy | City | 3,482 |
| Runge | Town | 895 |
| Falls City | City | 516 |
Karnes City and Kenedy, five miles apart on US-181, are near enough the same size that the county's business is split between them. Kenedy carries the name of Mifflin Kenedy, the steamboat operator and rancher. Falls City in the northwest takes its name from a rapid on the San Antonio River.
Roads
- US-181 – the spine of the county, northwest to Floresville and San Antonio, southeast to Beeville and Corpus Christi.
- SH-123 – north from Karnes City to Stockdale and Seguin.
- SH-80 – northeast from Karnes City toward Nixon and Luling.
- SH-72 – west from Kenedy toward Three Rivers and I-37.
- SH-239 – east from Kenedy through Runge.
The San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway built through the county in the 1880s on its way from San Antonio to Corpus Christi, and it decided which towns lived.
Uranium and the Eagle Ford
An airborne survey found uranium in Karnes County in 1954, the first commercial discovery in Texas. Open-pit mines worked the shallow Jackson Group sands through the 1960s and 1970s, and a mill operated near Falls City; in-situ leaching later replaced most of the digging. The mill site was cleaned up and capped under the federal uranium mill tailings programme and is now a monitored legacy site. Permitted uranium projects in the county still come and go with the price.
The second boom was oil. The Eagle Ford shale runs beneath the county in its oil-rich window, and after 2010 Karnes County became one of the most heavily drilled counties in the play. Rig counts, sand trucks, pipeline crews, hotel construction and county tax revenue all jumped together, and the highways were rebuilt to carry the loads. Production has settled well below the peak but remains the largest single item in the local economy.
Panna Maria and Helena
On the night of Christmas Eve 1854, Silesian immigrants who had walked inland from Indianola stopped under an oak on the Cibolo and founded Panna Maria — the oldest permanent Polish settlement in the United States. The church of the Immaculate Conception still stands there, and the neighbouring villages of Cestohowa and Kosciusko carry the same ancestry.
Helena, on the old Chihuahua freight road, was the first county seat and had a reputation for violence that earned it the nickname of the toughest town on earth. When the railroad went to Karnes City instead in the 1880s, Helena lost the county seat in 1894 and emptied out. Its 1873 courthouse survives as a museum on FM 81, and the site is one of the more visitable ghost towns in South Texas.