24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Hempstead Hempstead, TX

Hempstead is the county seat of Waller County, Texas, and is part of the Houston metropolitan area, about 50 miles northwest of downtown Houston at the junction of U.S. Highway 290 and State Highways 6 and 159.

Hempstead was founded when Dr. Richard Rodgers Peebles and James W. McDade organized the Hempstead Town Company on December 29, 1856, and Peebles named the town for his brother-in-law, Dr. G. S. B. Hempstead.

The Houston and Texas Central Railway reached Hempstead on June 29, 1858, making it a major distribution point between the Gulf Coast and the interior of Texas, and the town incorporated on November 10, 1858.

Hempstead became the seat of Waller County when the county was created from parts of Austin and Grimes counties in 1873.

Hempstead was disincorporated in 1899 and did not reincorporate until June 10, 1935, and in 1984 it elected LeRoy Singleton as its first Black mayor.

Hempstead is nicknamed the Watermelon Capital of Texas: until the 1940s it was the top shipper of watermelons in the United States, and it still holds an annual Watermelon Festival in July.

In its rough early-20th-century years Hempstead was informally known as Six Shooter Junction.

During the Civil War the Confederacy ran camps of instruction and later the Camp Groce prison camp for captured Union soldiers near Hempstead.

German-American sculptor Elisabet Ney is buried at Liendo Plantation near Hempstead, where she lived part-time for 20 years.

Hempstead resident Lillie E. Drennan became the first woman to hold a commercial driver's license in Texas in 1929 and ran her own regional hauling company, the Drennan Truck Line.