Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Venus, TX

Venus is a town in Johnson County, Texas - with a portion extending into Ellis County - on State Highway 67 about 20 miles east of Cleburne.

Venus was first known as Gossip; families settled the area in the late 1850s, but the town itself was laid out in the late 1880s when J. C. Smyth bought 80 acres of abandoned cornfield and sold off town lots.

Venus was named in honor of the daughter of a local physician, and its post office opened in 1888.

Venus sat at the junction of two railroads - the International-Great Northern and the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe - and had just 10 residents in 1890.

By the mid-1890s Venus was one of the most prosperous towns in Johnson County, with 13 businesses, 31 houses, churches, a grade school and Burnetta College, a Disciples of Christ school that opened in 1896 with 250 students and operated until 1906.

Venus incorporated in 1903, later gained three banks and its own weekly newspaper, the Venus Express, and passed 800 residents by the late 1920s.

In 1912 Venus was among the first towns in Johnson County to build a sewage disposal system.

The Great Depression nearly emptied Venus - by 1940 only about 200 residents and a single business, the drug store, remained.

Venus recovered only slowly after the Depression, reaching about 300 residents by the late 1940s, 977 in 1990 and 910 in 2000.

Venus then boomed to 2,960 people in 2010 and 4,361 in the 2020 census, and the Census Bureau estimated its population at about 8,870 in 2025 - roughly double the 2020 count.