About this tour
Jourdanton is a town built almost entirely by two ambitious ranchers-turned-developers and a railroad. Jourdan Campbell and Theodore Zanderson platted it in 1909 on the edge of their own Toby Ranch, talked a land speculator into laying rail through it, and by 1911 had pulled off the unlikely feat of stealing the Atascosa County seat away from Pleasanton, which had held it for over fifty years. The dark-brick, Spanish-tile courthouse they built in 1912 still anchors a tight, walkable square, ringed by the churches, jail, and businesses a brand-new county seat needed fast. This short loop covers that square and the story of a town that willed itself into existence in barely two years.