Val Verde County

🏛️The era

Val Verde County was created in 1885, when Texas was carving its huge western territory into smaller counties. The land along the lower Pecos River and the Rio Grande was dry, rugged, and thinly settled. Until the 1870s it was largely beyond the reach of the settled Texas frontier. Railroad construction changed that. In the early 1880s a line pushed across southwest Texas toward El Paso, and new towns grew up along the tracks.

Del Rio, the county seat, grew up around a set of springs, rare and valuable in this arid country. Their water supported irrigation and settlement near the Rio Grande. The town's position on the international border made it a crossing point between Texas and Mexico from its early days.

The county's name, however, points to an earlier and very different chapter: the Civil War in the Far West. Twenty-three years before the county was created, Texans had marched up the Rio Grande into New Mexico Territory on one of the Confederacy's most ambitious campaigns. By naming a new county for one of that campaign's battles, the Texans of 1885 were remembering the war that many of them, or their fathers, had fought.

👥People & events

The battle that gave the county its name was fought in February 1862 at a ford on the Rio Grande near Fort Craig, in New Mexico Territory. (The marker gives February 19. Most accounts date the main fighting to February 21, after a few days of maneuvering, so dates vary depending on how that period is counted.) The Confederate army was made up mostly of Texas volunteers under Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley. They had marched from Texas to take New Mexico and possibly push on toward the silver and gold of the West and the Pacific ports.

Fort Craig was held by Union troops under Col. Edward R. S. Canby. Rather than attack the fort head-on, the Texans tried to go around it, and the two forces met at the river crossing called Valverde, or "green valley" in Spanish. The fighting was hard. By the end of the day the Confederates had won the field and captured Union artillery, but Canby's army was still holding Fort Craig behind them.

The victory didn't last. The Confederates went on to occupy Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but at Glorieta Pass in March 1862, Union troops destroyed their supply train. Without food and ammunition in an unforgiving land, the Texans had to retreat back down the Rio Grande, and they lost many men to hardship along the way. The campaign failed, and with it the Confederate hope of controlling the Southwest.

The county was formed in 1885 from parts of Crockett, Kinney, and Pecos counties and organized on March 31 of that year, with Del Rio as its seat. The name kept the memory of the Texans' distant battle alive for later generations.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Most Americans think of the Civil War in terms of Virginia, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. Val Verde County's name is a reminder that the war reached far beyond the East. The New Mexico Campaign was the Confederacy's main attempt to push into the Far West. If it had succeeded, it might have changed the balance of power over western territory, mines, and the route to California.

The campaign's failure helped keep the West in the Union. That mattered for the war and for what came afterward, including western settlement, transcontinental railroads, and the admission of new states. The Battle of Valverde was a Confederate victory on the field, but it belonged to a campaign that ended in retreat, and the county's name preserves that complicated history.

Place names are also a form of memory. After the Civil War, many Southern communities named places for Confederate figures and battles, and they did so for reasons that historians still discuss and debate. Val Verde County is one example of how Texans chose to write the war into the map of their state.

🧭If you visit

Del Rio sits on the Rio Grande across from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. It's a natural stop on a road trip through the southwestern corner of Texas. The town's springs made it an oasis in dry country, and water is still a big part of its character.

Val Verde County is known for more than its name. It lies in the Lower Pecos region, home to some of North America's most remarkable prehistoric rock art, painted in canyon shelters thousands of years ago. The area around Amistad Reservoir and the nearby canyons of the Pecos and Devils rivers make this one of the most dramatic landscapes in Texas, so give yourself time to explore beyond town.

As you stand at the marker, think about how far the battle it honors actually was. Valverde is hundreds of miles up the Rio Grande in New Mexico. If your trip continues west toward El Paso and on into New Mexico, you can follow the river toward the ground where the Texans fought in 1862.