Where Is Wimberley, Texas?

Where is Wimberley on the Texas Hill Country map?

Wimberley sits in central Hays County, west of the I-35 corridor and northwest of San Marcos. If you know Dripping Springs, move southwest. If you know New Braunfels, move northwest. Blanco is farther west. Those surrounding towns put Wimberley in a compact cluster on the eastern side of the Hill Country.

The more useful clue, though, is water. Wimberley is tied to the Blanco River and Cypress Creek. The confluence of those two waterways forms the geographic heart of the Wimberley Valley, and the old settlement grew around a mill on Cypress Creek.

Wimberley is a creek town before it is a road town

Jacob’s Well, north of town, is the primary spring source for Cypress Creek. From there, Cypress Creek flows through the Wimberley area, past Blue Hole, and eventually into the Blanco River. That chain is one of the cleanest geographic stories anywhere in the Hill Country.

It also explains why the settlement formed here. In 1856, William Carvin Winters built a gristmill on Cypress Creek. The community became known as Winters’ Mill. After ownership changed, it became Cude’s Mill, and after Pleasant Wimberley bought the mill in 1874, Wimberley’s Mill.

How Wimberley got its shorter name

In 1880, an application was made for a local post office under the name “Wimberleyville.” The name that came back was simply “Wimberley.” The mill itself eventually disappeared, but the shortened name stayed.

Wimberley remained an unincorporated Hill Country village for most of its history and did not incorporate until 2000. The landscape, however, still reads much the same way on a map: a small community organized around creeks, river crossings and the limestone country west of San Marcos.