Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Smiley Smiley, TX

Smiley is a small city in southwestern Gonzales County at the junction of U.S. Highway 87 and Farm Roads 108 and 3234, about twenty-one miles south of Gonzales.

Settlers were drawn to the Smiley area in the 1840s by a long, narrow natural lake on the main San Antonio-to-Indianola trade route, and the town itself was established in the early 1870s when trader and sheep herder John Smiley settled by the lake that took his name.

Smiley's post office was established in 1884, and by 1894 — with a tanyard and a wire-fence factory — the settlement was probably the third largest town in Gonzales County.

Smiley incorporated in 1911, but a devastating fire struck the town that very same year.

In the 1930s and 1940s Smiley reinvented itself as a poultry-processing center, with two factories among its dozen businesses.

The 2020 census counted 475 people in Smiley living in 232 households, and the entire city fits into just half a square mile of land.

Smiley's youngest students attend Nixon-Smiley Elementary School right in town on Anglin Street, part of the Nixon-Smiley Consolidated Independent School District, while older students go to Nixon-Smiley High School in nearby Nixon.