Seguin, Texas

Seguin sits at one of the oldest crossroads in Texas. It's the Guadalupe County seat, 35 miles east of downtown San Antonio on I-10 and twenty minutes from New Braunfels, founded on August 12, 1838 by members of Mathew Caldwell's Gonzales Rangers just sixteen months after the Battle of San Jacinto. That puts it among the oldest continuously-occupied Anglo settlements in the state — older than Austin, older than Fort Worth, older than most of what Texans casually think of as "Texas."

The town is named for Juan Seguín — a Tejano captain who fought at San Jacinto, later served as a senator in the Republic of Texas, and whose complicated story (he was ordered to evacuate the Alamo rather than die in it, was later pushed into exile in Mexico, returned to Texas, and is buried in Seguin proper) is the kind of history most relocation buyers don't know until they've moved in. The 1936 Guadalupe County Courthouse — Moderne / Art Deco, Public Works Administration-built, with Harold Calhoun sandstone reliefs — still anchors the downtown square. The original 1962 "World's Largest Pecan" concrete monument still sits on the courthouse lawn; a second, larger fiberglass pecan at the Big Red Barn reclaimed the world title in 2011.

The Guadalupe River runs through Seguin and shapes much of its character. Max Starcke Park — 227 acres along the river — hosts an 18-hole regulation golf course, a wave pool, a paddling trail, Little League fields, and the Power Plant Bar and Grill inside a decommissioned hydroelectric plant. The river's recreational pull is real, but so is its flood history — the 1998 Canyon Lake Dam event was the worst downstream flood on record, and more recent events in 2015, 2018, 2020, 2021, and July 2025 have kept river-adjacent underwriting honest.

Seguin is also where the limecrete came from. In the 1840s, Dr. John Park brought a caliche-and-lime concrete technique to town, and by the 1870s Seguin had earned the nickname "Mother of Concrete Cities." Nearly 100 limecrete structures were built here; roughly 20 survive today, including the Sebastopol House State Historic Site (1856) and the original 1840 section of The Magnolia Hotel. That concentration is the largest of its kind in the United States. Add in Texas Lutheran University — founded in 1891, relocated to Seguin in 1912, ~1,400 students today, NCAA Division III Bulldogs — and you have a town with more genuine historical and cultural depth than its population suggests.

The modern story is manufacturing and growth. Caterpillar opened a diesel-engine plant in Seguin in 2008, Schaeffler (formerly Continental Automotive, formerly Vitesco) runs a ~1,750-employee automotive electronics operation, and CMC Steel, Tyson Foods, Alamo Group, and Inteplast combine for 8,000+ manufacturing jobs inside city limits — more than four times the national per-capita average. The U.S. Census estimates Seguin grew 31.7% between 2020 and 2024, the 8th-fastest growth rate in Texas. And Burnt Bean Co. at 108 S. Austin Street, which opened in 2019, was named Texas Monthly's #1 BBQ joint in the state in 2025. Most Texans still don't know it's here. That's changing fast.