Waller County Texas map
30.01° N · 95.98° W · County seat: Hempstead · 518 sq mi · Central Time
Waller County's largest town is a university. Prairie View counted 8,190 residents in 2020 against the county seat's 5,423, and almost all of that difference is the student body of Prairie View A&M, the land-grant university that has stood on the hill above US-290 since 1876. The rest of the county is Brazos bottom farmland caught in the path of Houston's westward growth: 56,794 people in 2020, an estimated 65,109 four years later.
Hempstead sits where US-290 and SH-6 cross in the north of the county; Prairie View is five miles southeast along US-290. I-10 clips the southern end through Brookshire, and the Brazos River makes the western boundary.
Where Waller County is
The county is the western doorstep of Harris County, on the line where the pine forest thins into open coastal prairie. Grimes County lies north, Montgomery County northeast, Harris County east, Fort Bend County south, Austin County west across the Brazos River and Washington County northwest.
From the county's centre point, Houston is 41 miles southeast in a straight line, The Woodlands 33 miles northeast, Sugar Land 34 miles southeast and College Station 47 miles northwest. The Grand Parkway, Houston's outer ring, runs a few miles inside the Harris County line, and the subdivisions and distribution warehouses that follow it have been spilling west across the county line along US-290 and I-10 for a decade — which is where the county's growth is coming from.
Waller County was carved out of Austin and Grimes counties in 1873 and named for Edwin Waller, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, laid out the street grid of Austin and served as that city's first mayor.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Prairie View | City | 8,190 |
| Hempstead | City (county seat) | 5,423 |
| Brookshire | City | 5,068 |
| Katy (part) | City | 4,397 |
| Waller (part) | City | 1,795 |
| Pine Island | Town | 1,077 |
| Pattison | City | 548 |
Katy straddles three counties — Harris, Fort Bend and Waller — and the city of Waller straddles the Harris County line. Both figures above count only the part inside this county.
Roads
- US-290 – the Houston–Austin corridor and the county's busiest road, entering from Harris County near the city of Waller and running northwest through Prairie View and Hempstead toward Brenham.
- SH-6 – crosses US-290 at Hempstead, running north toward Navasota, Bryan and College Station and south toward Sugar Land.
- I-10 – cuts across the southern end of the county through Brookshire, between Katy and Sealy.
- US-90 – the old highway alongside I-10 through Brookshire and Pattison.
- SH-159 – the western route from Hempstead across the Brazos toward Bellville.
- FM-1488 – the east–west road across the northeastern corner between Hempstead and Magnolia, and one of the main routes into the county from the Montgomery County side.
Prairie View A&M
The university opened in 1876 as the Alta Vista Agricultural and Mechanical College for Colored Youth, on a former plantation on the prairie above what is now US-290. It is the second-oldest public institution of higher education in Texas, a historically Black university, and the state's land-grant institution designated under the second Morrill Act of 1890, which is why its agricultural research and extension work reaches beyond the county. It has been part of the Texas A&M University System since the system was formed.
The campus and the city grew together. Prairie View incorporated as a city around the university, and its population rises and falls with the academic calendar — one reason a town of 8,190 is the largest in a county whose seat has the courthouse, the rail junction and the highways. Panther Stadium and the university farm sit on the same ridge; the campus is the county's largest employer.
Hempstead, the Brazos and the bottom land
Hempstead was laid out in the 1850s and became the terminus of the Houston and Texas Central Railway in 1858. The junction it grew into made it the shipping point for the Brazos bottom cotton plantations, and it earned a reputation rough enough in those decades that the town has been called Six-Shooter Junction ever since.
West of town the Brazos River forms the county line with Austin County, and the bottom land along it is the county's oldest farmland: cotton first, then corn and cattle, and now watermelons and truck crops sold along US-290. Liendo Plantation, east of Hempstead, is one of the older surviving plantation houses in the region and was used as a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp; the sculptor Elisabet Ney and her husband bought it in 1873 and lived there for years before she took a studio in Austin. On the county's southern prairie, Brookshire and Pattison sit among rice fields and, increasingly, among the warehouse parks pushing west along I-10.