Jourdanton is a city in South Texas and the county seat of Atascosa County, situated about 35 miles south of San Antonio at the junction of State Highways 16, 97, and 173. With a population of about 4,100, it is the governmental and administrative center of a largely rural county, and its history is unusually deliberate for a small Texas town: the community was laid out from a blueprint rather than growing up organically. The town was founded in 1909 by Jourdan Campbell, for whom it is named, as a designated stop on the Artesian Belt Railroad. Its planned beginnings gave it a head start, and by 1914 the young community had telephones, electricity, a cotton gin, a gristmill, and a public school system. In 1910, county residents voted to move the Atascosa County seat to Jourdanton, and a new mission-style courthouse—still in use today—was completed in 1912. That courthouse remains the symbolic and functional center of the city. Today Jourdanton functions as the seat of a county whose economy and culture remain tied to ranching, agriculture, and the oil-and-gas activity of the surrounding region. Students attend the Jourdanton Independent School District, a seven-school system serving roughly 1,600 students from the city and the wider county. The community is close-knit and family-oriented, with a strong local identity rooted in its railroad founding and its role as the county's administrative heart. Its position on the southern edge of the San Antonio metropolitan area gives residents a rural, small-town way of life with convenient access to the city's employment, medical, and cultural resources.