Smiley is a small city in western Gonzales County, Texas, in the gently rolling ranch and farm country southeast of San Antonio. The 2020 census counted 475 residents, making it one of the county's smallest incorporated communities. Its location near the juncture of several farm-to-market roads places it between the larger towns of Nixon to the south and Gonzales, the county seat, to the east. The community was established in the early 1870s, when a trader and sheepherder named John Smiley settled beside a long, narrow lake that became known as Smiley Lake. The settlement that grew around him took his name, and by 1896 a school district had been organized there, with earlier schoolhouses dating to the 1870s. Cotton farming anchored the local economy for decades, and the town developed the churches, stores, and civic institutions typical of a South Texas agricultural center. In the early twentieth century, the area's economy broadened with the discovery of oil and gas, and wells drilled around Smiley added a second source of income alongside the region's ranching and farming. The city incorporated and, as early as 1911, citizens voted to build a two-story red-brick schoolhouse, a mark of the town's early prosperity. Gonzales County itself carries deep Texas history as the site of the first battle of the Texas Revolution in 1835, and Smiley shares in that regional heritage. Today Smiley remains a quiet, close-knit community. Public education is provided by the Nixon-Smiley Consolidated Independent School District, and residents look to nearby Nixon, Gonzales, and Seguin for larger retail, medical, and employment needs. Its setting amid pasture, cropland, and live oak gives Smiley a distinctly rural South Texas character that has persisted for more than a century.