24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Bellville, TX

Bellville is the county seat of Austin County, at the junction of State Highways 36 and 159 — a county that shares its name with the state capital but sits in southeast Texas, far from the city of Austin.

Bellville was named for Thomas Bell, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, who came to Texas in 1822 and built a home in the area by 1838.

In 1846 voters decided to replace San Felipe with a new county seat near the geographic center of Austin County, and Thomas Bell and his brother James donated more than 145 acres for the town, which was surveyed and laid out in 1848.

Bellville stood on the eastern edge of the Texas-German belt, and its population was so heavily German that the town's schools once provided instruction in both English and German.

Bellville grew slowly until the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad reached it in the winter of 1879–80, when the population jumped from 300 to 522 in just four months and reached about 1,000 by the mid-1880s.

The courthouse square in Bellville remains laid out much as it was in 1846, when district surveyor D. Charles Amthor platted the town around it.

As of the 2020 census, Bellville had a population of 4,206, living in 1,729 households.

Bellville's old county jail now operates as the Austin County Jail Museum, which displays artifacts and tells stories of the outlaws and lawmen of the town's past.

From 1860 to 1869 Bellville had its own newspaper, The Bellville Countryman, published by John Patterson Osterhout.

Bellville's population dipped to about 1,300 during the Great Depression but climbed back past 2,000 by the early 1950s and surpassed 3,000 in the late 1980s.