Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near Hunters Crossing Bastrop, TX

Bastrop is the county seat of Bastrop County and one of the oldest towns in Texas, incorporated on December 18, 1837, while Texas was still an independent republic.

The town was platted on June 8, 1832, and was named for Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop, the Dutch-born emissary who helped Moses and Stephen F. Austin secure their land grants from Mexico.

Bastrop was briefly renamed Mina in 1834 in honor of Mexican revolutionary Francisco Javier Mina, but the original name was restored when the town incorporated in 1837.

The 2020 census counted 9,688 residents in Bastrop living in 3,714 households, and a Census Bureau estimate put the population at 13,383 in 2025 as growth from nearby Austin spills over.

Only 52.2 percent of occupied housing units in Bastrop were owner-occupied in the 2020 census.

Bastrop calls itself 'The Most Historic Small Town in Texas': in 1978, 131 of its buildings and sites were placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The town is also known as the 'Heart of the Lost Pines,' sitting beside the Lost Pines Forest, the westernmost stand of loblolly pines in the southern pine forest, which supplied lumber that helped build Austin beginning in 1839.

Bastrop State Park, set among the Lost Pines, sits on the eastern edge of the city.

On September 4, 2011, the Bastrop County Complex Fire — the most destructive wildfire in Texas history — burned through the area, destroying 1,691 homes and killing two people, with insured damage estimated at $325 million.

Historic downtown Bastrop sits on a bluff on the east bank of the Colorado River, about 30 miles southeast of Austin.