Biohazard Cleanup Near West Webster Webster, TX

Webster was founded in 1879 by James W. Webster under the name Gardentown, as a colony for settlers from England on the Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad in extreme southern Harris County.

The settlement took a post office under the name Websterville in 1882, but flooding and the pull of nearby Houston kept it a tiny farming village of only a few hundred people for decades.

In 1903 Seito Saibara, a former member of the Japanese parliament, settled in Webster and introduced rice farming there, laying the foundations of the rice industry of the entire U.S. Gulf Coast.

Webster incorporated in 1958, and as late as 1960 it had only 329 residents.

Everything changed in 1961, when NASA announced it would build the Manned Spacecraft Center — now the Johnson Space Center — about three miles east of Webster on Clear Lake, and the city's population jumped 578% during the 1960s.

Webster calls itself the gateway to the Johnson Space Center, and its motto is "Linked to the Future."

Webster counted 12,499 residents in the 2020 census, and the Census Bureau estimated its population at 12,507 in 2025.

Webster has about 5,991 households, but only about 22.4% of its homes are owner-occupied and the average household holds just 2.03 people — a renter-heavy profile driven by apartments serving the space and medical workforce.

Webster's economy today is built around hospitals, hotels, restaurants, shopping centers and aerospace firms rather than the farms it began with.

The 326-acre Challenger Seven Memorial Park in Webster honors the seven astronauts lost in the 1986 Challenger disaster, and about 100 acres of it form a Houston Audubon Society bird sanctuary with boardwalks over the Clear Creek wetlands.