Lampasas County Texas map

The county sits on the northeastern rim of the Edwards Plateau, on the seam between the Hill Country and the prairies of Central Texas. Six counties border it: Hamilton north, Coryell northeast, Bell southeast, Burnet south, San Saba west and Mills northwest. Killeen is 31 miles east, Georgetown 51 miles southeast, Temple 54 miles east and Austin about 71 miles southeast.

The legislature created Lampasas County in 1856 out of parts of Bell, Coryell and Travis counties. The name comes from the Lampasas River, which rises in the eastern part of the county — lampazos is the Spanish word Spanish explorers used for the water plants growing along it, usually rendered as lilies. Lampasas County is counted in the Killeen–Temple metropolitan area, and the army post at Fort Hood lies just across the line in Bell and Coryell counties; Copperas Cove, the post's western gate town, spills over into this county, and Kempner and Lampasas both house soldiers and civilian workers who commute to it.

Hancock Springs and Hanna Springs both rise on the edge of the town of Lampasas, and their sulphur-smelling water was the reason the town grew where it did. The first bathhouses were built in the 1870s; the arrival of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1882 turned Lampasas into a destination, with a large resort hotel, a park and streetcars to carry visitors from the depot to the water. The fashion for mineral cures faded by the turn of the century and the hotel is gone, but Hancock Springs still feeds a spring-fed public swimming pool in the city park — a free-flowing pool of the kind that has almost disappeared elsewhere in Texas.

Sulphur Creek runs through the town between the springs, and its limestone bed and small waterfalls carry the county's water east into the Lampasas River and eventually into the Little River and the Brazos. The western half of the county drains the other way, to the Colorado.

The Colorado River runs along the county's northwestern edge in a deep, twisting limestone canyon, forming part of the line with San Saba County. Colorado Bend State Park occupies that canyon country, reached by unpaved road through Bend at the end of FM 580 west of Lampasas. Gorman Falls, in the park, is a living travertine waterfall: spring water carrying dissolved limestone falls over a face of moss and calcite that is still growing. The falls are reached only on foot over a rough trail, and visitors are kept off the formation itself.

The park is also the main place in Texas for guided wild-cave trips — Gorman Cave and a set of smaller undeveloped caves are toured with helmets and lights rather than by walkway, and the river below the falls is a fishing and paddling stretch with primitive campsites along the bank.