Somerset Map
Somerset is a city of Bexar County in the U.S. state of Texas. It is located less than 20 miles south of San Antonio and is part of the San Antonio–New Braunfels metropolitan area. The population was 1,550 at the 2000 census.
Somerset was named for a 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.
Nearby cities include Natalia, Poteet, Castroville, Devine, San Antonio.