Somerset, Texas 4.94

Somerset is a city located in Bexar County, Texas, United States. It is located less than 20 miles south of Downtown San Antonio and is part of the metropolitan area. The population was 1,631 at the 2010 census.HistoryEnglish speaking European settlers had already arrived in the area by the early 1800s. Somerset was named for an organized settlement that had been begun in 1848, in what is now Atascosa County, by a group of Baptist families from Somerset, Kentucky. The present site was named Somerset when the First Townsite Company was formed on the Artesian Belt Railroad right-of-way on May 25, 1909, by A. M. Pyron, Carl Kurz, and Jonas A. Kerr.In 1913, while drilling for artesian water, Kurz discovered oil. A boom followed. The Somerset oilfield extended from Somerset to below Pleasanton and was the largest known shallow field in the world at that time. Two oil refineries in the field and a pipeline into San Antonio handled the high-gravity crude.The town grew rapidly from fifty residents in 1925 to 700 in 1928; it was served by a state bank, a ten-room hotel, and several machine and blacksmith shops. A post office opened there in 1920. A nearby lignite coal mine also added to the booming economy of the area.During the 1920s farmers turned from cotton to dryland fruit and vegetable farming. In 1931, the Somerset Fruit Growers Exchange building was dedicated, and between truck farming, oil, and coal, the town prospered until the mid-1930s, when diminishing oil returns and the Great Depression caused a decline. In 1931 the town reported twenty businesses; by 1958 there were only eight.In 1920, the Somerset Independent School District was formed from at least five other school districts: Wildman, Senior, Bexar, Old Rock (Old Somerset area), and Oak Island. The Somerset Police Department was created in 1972 followed by the city being incorporated in 1973. Somerset has a mayor-council form of city government.