Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Stephenville, TX

Stephenville is the county seat of Erath County, Texas, founded in 1854 and named for John M. Stephen, who settled there that year and donated the land for the townsite, which was laid out by George B. Erath when the county was organized in 1856.

Stephenville sits on the North Bosque River about 100 miles southwest of Dallas, and its early years were rough: Comanche raids and the Civil War shrank the town from 766 people in 1858 to about 300 by 1871.

Stephenville was incorporated in 1889, the year the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway arrived, and most of the stone buildings still standing on its courthouse square date from the 1890s boom that followed.

Stephenville is home to Tarleton State University, founded in 1899 as John Tarleton Agricultural College with an endowment from settler John Tarleton, which joined the Texas A&M University System in 1917 and became a university in 1973.

Tarleton State University is Stephenville's largest employer and its cultural center, and the town is also served by a campus of Ranger College.

Stephenville had a population of 20,897 at the 2020 census, with about 8,247 households; because so many residents are students, only about 44% of its homes are owner-occupied, one of the lowest rates for a Texas city its size, and households average just 2.20 people.

Stephenville promotes itself as the Cowboy Capital of the World, a nod to the many professional rodeo cowboys who live and train in Erath County.

Stephenville is the principal city of the Stephenville Micropolitan Statistical Area and a retail and medical hub for the Cross Timbers region of Texas.

The town's newspaper, the Empire-Tribune, was formed in the 1890s by merging Stephenville's two rival papers and is still publishing today.

Public school students in Stephenville attend the Stephenville Independent School District, whose high school teams are known as the Yellow Jackets.