Limestone County Texas map

Seven counties touch it, more than most: Navarro north, Freestone northeast, Leon southeast, Robertson south, Falls southwest, McLennan west and Hill northwest. Waco is 33 miles west, Temple 54 miles southwest and Bryan 62 miles southeast in a straight line.

The county was created in 1846, carved whole out of Robertson County, and named for the limestone that outcrops across it. The seat moved to Groesbeck in 1873 when the Houston and Texas Central railway came through; the old seat, Springfield, was left off the line and disappeared, and its site is now inside Fort Parker State Park.

The Navasota River runs the length of the county from northwest to southeast, and every one of the county's 28 square miles of water is on it. That is a high share for an inland county and it comes from three separate impoundments on the same river.

Mexia is nearly twice the size of the county seat, a legacy of the oil years. Tehuacana, on a hill in the north of the county, is the smallest incorporated place but had a college — Trinity University began there in 1869 before moving on to Waxahachie and eventually San Antonio, and Westminster College used the buildings afterwards. Mart, on the McLennan County line, has all but ten of its residents on the other side.

Fort Parker was a private stockade built in 1834 by the Parker family, who had come from Illinois to the headwaters of the Navasota. On 19 May 1836, weeks after San Jacinto, a large Comanche and Kiowa party attacked it, killed several of the men and took five captives. One of them, Cynthia Ann Parker, was raised among the Comanche, married Peta Nocona and was the mother of Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Quahada band. She was recaptured against her will in 1860 and never settled back into Anglo Texas. The stockade was rebuilt as a replica in the 1930s and the Old Fort Parker site now sits on SH-14 north of Groesbeck.

Fort Parker State Park, a couple of miles further on, is Civilian Conservation Corps work from the same decade — the corps dammed the Navasota to make Fort Parker Lake and built the boathouse, spillway and picnic shelters in local stone. The park has camping, fishing and short trails, and the townsite of Springfield, the county's first seat, and its cemetery lie within the park boundary.

The Mexia field came in during 1921 on the Mexia fault zone, and the town went from a few thousand people to a boom camp inside a year. Gambling halls and saloons set up along the road out of town, the courts could not keep up, and in January 1922 Governor Pat Neff declared martial law over the district and sent the National Guard and the Texas Rangers to shut it down. The field settled into decades of steady production; the derricks are gone, but pump jacks still work fields across the north of the county and the county's tax base has never fully separated from oil and gas.

Mexia today is best known locally for the Mexia State Supported Living Center, on the site of an old army and veterans' facility south of town, which is among the largest employers in the county. Lake Mexia, on the Navasota just west of the city, is the town's water supply and its recreation water, and Lake Limestone, formed by Sterling C. Robertson Dam downstream at the Robertson County line, supplies water well beyond the county.