Walker County Texas map
30.74° N · 95.57° W · County seat: Huntsville · 801 sq mi
Drivers on I-45 between Houston and Dallas know Walker County from two things visible from the road: a 67-foot white statue of Sam Houston standing in the pines south of Huntsville, and the red brick walls of the state penitentiary a few exits north. Huntsville is where Sam Houston died, where Texas keeps its prison system headquarters, and where Sam Houston State University has taught since 1879.
I-45 runs north–south through the middle of the county past New Waverly, Huntsville and Riverside. The green block in the south is the Sam Houston National Forest; the Trinity River forms the eastern boundary.
Where Walker County is
Walker County lies in east-central Texas on the I-45 corridor, 69 miles northwest of Houston, 31 miles north of Conroe and 46 miles east of College Station in a straight line. Six counties border it: Houston County to the north, Trinity northeast, San Jacinto east, Montgomery south, Grimes west and Madison northwest. The Trinity River makes the eastern and northeastern boundary; Riverside, the county's smallest incorporated town, sits beside it on SH-19.
The county was cut out of Montgomery County in 1846 and named for Robert J. Walker, the Mississippi senator who pushed the Texas annexation resolution through Congress. When Walker sided with the Union in the Civil War, the legislature kept the name but reassigned it to Samuel H. Walker — no relation — a Texas Ranger and Mexican–American War soldier whose name also went on the Walker Colt revolver.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Huntsville | City (county seat) | 45,823 |
| New Waverly | City | 910 |
| Riverside | City | 522 |
Three incorporated places, and Huntsville holds about 60 percent of the county's residents. The census counts university students and prison inmates where they sleep, so both push the Huntsville figure well above the number of people who own homes in town. Outside those three dots the county is farms, pine plantations, national forest and lakeside subdivisions along the Trinity.
Roads
- I-45 – the spine, south through New Waverly to Conroe and Houston, north past Riverside toward Madisonville and Dallas.
- US-190 – east from Huntsville toward Onalaska and Livingston; it runs with I-45 north to Madisonville before turning west.
- SH-30 – the direct road west from Huntsville to Bryan and College Station.
- SH-19 – northeast from Huntsville past Riverside toward Trinity and Crockett.
- SH-75 – the old highway parallel to I-45, through New Waverly and Huntsville.
- SH-150 – east from New Waverly through the national forest toward Coldspring.
Huntsville: the university and the prisons
Sam Houston State University opened in 1879 as the Sam Houston Normal Institute, a state teacher-training school on the site of an earlier academy, and now enrols more students than the town has permanent residents. Its criminal justice college grew up alongside the industry next door.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has its headquarters in Huntsville, and the county holds a cluster of units: the Huntsville Unit — the Walls, opened in 1849 and the oldest prison in the state — sits on 12th Street a few blocks from the courthouse square, with the Wynne, Estelle, Ellis, Goree, Byrd and Holliday units spread around the edges of town. The Walls contains the state's execution chamber, which is why Huntsville turns up in national news more often than a town of its size otherwise would. The Texas Prison Museum on I-45 handles the public-facing half of that history.
Sam Houston moved to Huntsville after his years as president of the Republic and as governor, and died there in 1863. His grave is in Oakwood Cemetery, his Woodland Home and the Steamboat House are kept as museum buildings on the university's edge, and the David Adickes statue "A Tribute to Courage" — 67 feet of white concrete over a steel frame — stands beside I-45 at a visitor centre south of town, tall enough to see from the freeway before you reach the exit.
Forest, park and lake
The Sam Houston National Forest covers a broad band across the southern county and continues into San Jacinto and Montgomery counties; the district office is in New Waverly, just off I-45. The Lone Star Hiking Trail, the longest continuous footpath in Texas, runs through that forest.
Huntsville State Park sits inside the forest boundary a few miles south of town, built around Lake Raven, a small dammed lake with a swimming area, campsites and trails under loblolly pine. Fishing water on the other side of the county is the Trinity River and the upper end of Lake Livingston, whose backwater reaches the Walker County shore near Riverside.