Kenedy County Texas map
26.89° N · 97.59° W · County seat: Sarita · 1,946 sq mi
Kenedy County had 350 residents at the 2020 census spread over 1,459 square miles of land — about one person for every four square miles, and the third-lowest county population in Texas. It contains no incorporated city or town, and almost all of it is two private ranches.
The single road down the middle is US-77. The water on the east is the Laguna Madre, behind Padre Island; Baffin Bay cuts in at the top of the map.
Where Kenedy County is
The county was created in 1921 out of parts of Hidalgo and Willacy counties during a reorganization of Willacy, and it was named for Mifflin Kenedy, the steamboat operator and rancher who with Richard King ran freight on the Rio Grande before both men turned to land. It is a rectangle of coastal prairie between the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi: Kleberg County north, Willacy County south, Hidalgo County southwest and Brooks County west.
Baffin Bay makes up much of the Kleberg line. On the east the county fronts the Laguna Madre and, beyond it, Padre Island and the Gulf. Corpus Christi is about 64 miles northeast, Harlingen 49 miles south and McAllen 62 miles southwest. Kenedy is the 13th-largest Texas county by total area but only the 25th-largest by land, because a quarter of it is water.
Settlements
There are no incorporated places at all. Sarita, the county seat, is an unincorporated village on US-77 laid out in 1904 beside the railroad and named for Sarita Kenedy East, a granddaughter of Mifflin Kenedy. It holds the courthouse, the school, a post office and the Kenedy Ranch Museum of South Texas, which occupies the ranch's old headquarters office building. Armstrong, farther south on US-77, is a King Ranch siding rather than a town. Everything else on the map is a ranch gate.
Roads
- US-77 – runs the full north–south length of the county, roughly 45 miles from the Kleberg line to the Willacy line, carrying nearly all traffic between Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande Valley. Sarita and Armstrong are the only places to stop.
- Interstate 69E – under construction along the US-77 corridor; sections are being upgraded to interstate standard as frontage roads and overpasses are built.
- FM-628 and county ranch roads – short branches east toward the Laguna Madre shore, most of them ending at private gates.
The U.S. Border Patrol operates a permanent inland checkpoint on US-77 in the county; northbound traffic stops there.
Two ranches and the Laguna Madre
The Kenedy Ranch, called La Parra, covers the southern and central part of the county and is held today by charitable trusts founded by the Kenedy heirs. The Norias Division of the King Ranch takes in much of the west and south. Between them the two properties account for the great majority of the county's land, which is why the population has never risen: there is no subdivided land to build on. Cattle, hunting leases, oil and gas royalties and wind leases are the economy.
The eastern edge is one of the least-developed shorelines in the United States. The Laguna Madre here is hypersaline — shallow, cut off from free exchange with the Gulf, and saltier than seawater — and it supports one of the largest seagrass beds in the country. Padre Island runs the length of the county offshore, with the southern stretch of the Padre Island National Seashore reaching down along it. There is no bridge, no paved access and no town on the barrier island for the whole width of the county.