Coryell County Texas map
31.39° N · 97.80° W · County seat: Gatesville · 1,057 sq mi
Two institutions take up most of Coryell County. The southern third is Fort Hood's training land — hundreds of square miles of scrub and range roads closed to the public — and Gatesville, the county seat, is the prison town of Texas, with a cluster of state units that holds most of the women incarcerated in the state.
Gatesville sits centre-north on the Leon River. The road-free block in the south of the county is the Fort Hood reservation; Copperas Cove is at its southwestern corner.
Where Coryell County is
Coryell sits on the eastern edge of the Lampasas Cut Plain, where flat-topped limestone divides stand above the Leon River valley. Five counties border it: Bosque to the north, McLennan northeast, Bell southeast, Lampasas southwest and Hamilton northwest.
Killeen is 19 miles south of the county's centre in a straight line, Temple 34 miles southeast and Waco 40 miles northeast. No interstate crosses the county except I-14, which enters only at the southern corner through Copperas Cove.
The county was cut out of Bell County in 1854 and named for James Coryell, a frontiersman and Texas Ranger killed in a raid on the Falls of the Brazos in the 1830s. Coryell is counted with Bell and Lampasas in the Killeen–Temple metropolitan statistical area.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Copperas Cove (part) | City | 35,760 |
| Gatesville | City (county seat) | 16,127 |
| Oglesby | City | 444 |
| South Mountain | Town | 408 |
| Evant (part) | Town | 327 |
Copperas Cove is the county's largest place but sits at the far southern corner, functionally part of the Killeen built-up area on the far side of the Fort Hood gate; small parts of it spill into Bell and Lampasas counties. Evant straddles the line into Hamilton County on US-281. McGregor sits mostly in McLennan County with a fragment in Coryell. Everything else in the county is unincorporated: Flat, Purmela, Mound, Turnersville, Pearl and the scattered farmsteads along the FM roads.
Roads
- US-84 – the main diagonal, southwest from Waco through McGregor and Gatesville toward Evant and Goldthwaite.
- US-281 – north–south along the western side through Evant, linking Lampasas to Hico and Stephenville.
- State Highway 36 – northeast out of Gatesville toward Mother Neff State Park and Temple, southwest toward Hamilton.
- State Highway 9 – south from Gatesville to Copperas Cove, skirting the western edge of the Fort Hood reservation.
- I-14 / US-190 – clips the southern corner through Copperas Cove on the way from Lampasas to Killeen.
- State Highway 236 – the short Gatesville connector toward the Leon River bottom.
The Fort Hood training land
Fort Hood — briefly renamed Fort Cavazos between 2023 and 2025 — has its barracks, headquarters and airfields in Bell County, but the land soldiers actually train on is mostly here. The reservation's manoeuvre areas, live-fire ranges and impact areas fill the southern part of Coryell County, which is why the map shows a large block with no towns and no through roads between Gatesville and Copperas Cove. Public roads stop at the boundary fence.
Two things follow from that. First, the county's population is concentrated at the two ends — Gatesville in the north, Copperas Cove in the south — with almost nothing in between. Second, the artillery ranges make Coryell one of the largest tracts of undeveloped grassland in Central Texas, and the reservation supports nesting golden-cheeked warblers and black-capped vireos, two songbirds protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Gatesville and the prison units
The state took over a Gatesville site in the 1880s as a reform school for boys and never left. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice now runs a cluster of units in and around Gatesville, among them the Mountain View, Hilltop, Crain and Murray units, and most of the women serving state sentences in Texas are held in that cluster. Corrections is the county seat's largest employer and the reason a town of about 16,000 people has the traffic of a much bigger one on visiting days.
Northeast of Gatesville, off State Highway 36 near Moody, Mother Neff State Park occupies a bend of the Leon River. It is the oldest state park in Texas: Isabella Eleanor Neff left six acres of the river bottom to the public in 1921, her son Pat Neff — governor from 1921 to 1925 — added to it, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the stone tower, pavilion and picnic grounds in the 1930s. The park's founding is the reason Texas has a state park system at all, and Pat Neff signed the law that created the parks board.