Lee County Texas map
30.32° N · 96.98° W · County seat: Giddings · 634 sq mi
Lee County is the crossroads of the sandy post oak country between Austin and Brenham. US-290 and US-77 meet in the middle of Giddings, the county holds the Wendish colony at Serbin — the only settlement of its kind in the United States — and the Austin Chalk oil trend that runs beneath it made the county a drilling centre twice over.
Giddings sits at the centre where US-290 and US-77 cross. Lexington is in the northwest on SH-21, and Serbin is southwest of Giddings on the county roads off FM 448.
Where Lee County is
Six counties surround it: Milam north, Burleson northeast, Washington east, Fayette southeast, Bastrop southwest and Williamson northwest. It sits almost exactly between two metros: Austin is 46 miles west, Bryan and College Station 44 miles northeast, Round Rock 44 miles northwest. Houston is a straight run east on US-290.
The county was created in 1874 from parts of Bastrop, Burleson, Fayette and Washington counties and named for Robert E. Lee, who had died four years earlier. That late creation date matters on the ground: the county lines are irregular, and several of its older communities were founded decades before the county that now contains them.
The land is Post Oak Savannah — deep sandy soils, scattered oaks, and creek bottoms draining east toward the Brazos and south toward the Colorado. Yegua Creek forms much of the northern boundary with Burleson and Milam counties.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Giddings | City (county seat) | 4,985 |
| Lexington | Town | 1,218 |
Only two places in the county are incorporated, and together they hold about a third of the population. Everyone else lives in unincorporated communities — Serbin, Dime Box, Fedor, Loebau, Northrup, Manheim, Lincoln, Tanglewood — or on the farm-to-market roads between them. Dime Box is split into Old Dime Box and Dime Box, a mile and a half apart, because the railroad ran past the original site in 1913.
Roads
- US-290 – the main east–west route, entering from Bastrop County and running through Giddings toward Burton, Brenham and Houston.
- US-77 – north–south through Giddings, up toward Rockdale and Waco, down toward La Grange and Schulenburg.
- State Highway 21 – the diagonal across the northwest, following the route of the Old San Antonio Road through Lexington toward Bastrop one way and Caldwell the other.
- Loop 123 – the short bypass carrying US-290 traffic around the north side of Giddings.
- FM 448 and FM 1624 – the roads south and southwest of Giddings that reach Serbin and the Wendish church.
The Wends at Serbin
In 1854 a group of about 500 Wends — Sorbs, a Slavic people from Lusatia in what is now eastern Germany — sailed for Texas under their pastor, Johann Kilian, after leaving over religious and language pressure at home. Many died on the voyage; the survivors bought land in what was then Bastrop County and named the settlement Serbin, from their own name for themselves.
St. Paul Lutheran Church at Serbin, finished in 1871, is the mother church of the Wendish congregations in Texas and still stands with its balcony pews and painted interior; Kilian preached in Wendish, German and English. The Texas Wendish Heritage Museum next to it holds the colony's records, and the Wendish Fest each September is the main gathering for descendants scattered across the state. Serbin is the only Wendish colony ever established in the United States, and Lee County's German-Wendish family names — Lehmann, Zoch, Symmank, Mitschke — still run through the school rolls.
The Austin Chalk under Giddings
The Austin Chalk, a tight limestone formation, runs in a band across the state from the Rio Grande to East Texas, and Lee County sits on the productive middle of it. The Giddings field was found in 1960 and stayed modest until the 1970s, when better fracture stimulation turned the chalk into a boom and filled the motels along US-290 with crews. The second act came in the late 1980s, when operators began drilling horizontal wells here to cut across the vertical fractures the chalk depends on — some of the earliest commercial horizontal drilling in the United States was done in this field, and the techniques worked out at Giddings were later carried into the Eagle Ford and the Permian.
Away from the wells, the county's economy is cattle, hay and hunting leases. Giddings is also the site of one of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department's large secure facilities, on the east side of town off US-290, and one of the county's steadiest employers.