Biohazard Cleanup Near West Beeville Beeville, TX

Beeville is the county seat of Bee County in South Texas, sitting on Poesta Creek at the intersection of U.S. Highways 181 and 59, about 47 miles north of Corpus Christi.

The Beeville site was settled in the 1830s by the Burke, Carroll, and Heffernan families; when Bee County was organized in 1858 its first seat was a place called Beeville-on-the-Medio, seven miles east of the present town.

In 1859 Ann Burke Carroll, Patrick Carroll, and Patrick Burke donated 150 acres on Poesta Creek for the present townsite; the new town was first named Maryville for Mary Heffernan, a survivor of an 1836 massacre of her family, but the name was changed to Beeville eight months later.

Bee County and its county seat are named not for the insect but for Barnard E. Bee Sr., who served the Republic of Texas as secretary of war and secretary of state.

Beeville was first incorporated as a town in 1890, though that incorporation was dissolved the next year and the town reincorporated in 1908.

The Bee County Courthouse in downtown Beeville was built in 1913 and designed by architect William Charles Stephenson, who came from Buffalo, New York, in 1908 and designed many of the city's stately homes, commercial buildings, and schools; a jet aircraft on the courthouse lawn commemorates the city's naval air station years.

During World War II the Navy trained aviators at the air station at Chase Field near Beeville from 1943 to 1946; reopened in 1952 as Naval Air Station Chase Field, it trained pilots until closing in 1992, and the site is now the Chase Field Industrial Complex, hosting Texas Department of Criminal Justice offices and prison transfer facilities - three state prisons operate in the Beeville area.

Beeville is home to the main campus of Coastal Bend College, which opened in 1967 as Bee County College with about 790 students, was renamed in 1998, and now enrolls more than 3,700 students with branch campuses in Alice, Kingsville, and Pleasanton.

Beeville is a designated National Main Street City and a Bee City USA community, and its public schools are run by the Beeville Independent School District across seven campuses.

Beeville had 13,669 residents in the 2020 census, living in about 4,890 households, up from 12,863 residents in 2010.