Conroe, Texas map

Conroe lies on I-45 about 40 miles north of downtown Houston and 12 miles north of The Woodlands. It is the northern edge of the Houston metro and the start of the pine belt: the loblolly forest that runs from here across East Texas begins around the city limits. Montgomery County covers 1,077 square miles and reached 620,443 residents in 2020, most of them in the I-45 corridor between Conroe and Spring.

Walker County is north up I-45 toward Huntsville, San Jacinto County northeast, Liberty County east, Harris County south, Waller County west and Grimes County northwest. The town of Montgomery, which gave the county its name, is 15 miles west on SH-105 past the lake.

Lake Conroe was impounded on the West Fork of the San Jacinto River and finished in 1973, a joint water-supply project of the San Jacinto River Authority and the City of Houston. It covers roughly 21,000 acres and has a long, branching shoreline, most of it developed with subdivisions, marinas and golf resorts: April Sound, Walden, Bentwater and Del Lago among them. SH-105 crosses the lake on a causeway west of the city, and the northern arm reaches into the Sam Houston National Forest, where the shoreline stays undeveloped.

The forest wraps the north and west of the county in three separate blocks totalling on the order of 163,000 acres, managed with Davy Crockett, Angelina and Sabine as the four national forests of Texas. The Lone Star Hiking Trail runs about 96 miles through it, the longest continuous footpath in the state, with trailheads reachable from FM-1375 and FM-149 north of Conroe. Stubblefield Lake and Double Lake are the developed recreation areas.

Timber built Conroe, but the money came from oil: George W. Strake brought in the Conroe field in December 1931, and the field's revenue paid for the county's public buildings through the 1930s. For a stretch in that decade the field was one of the largest producers in the United States, and it gave a small county seat a courthouse square out of proportion to its size.

Downtown kept two theatres from that period. The Crighton, a 1930s movie house on Main Street, was restored as a performing-arts venue, and the Owen Theatre sits a block away; together with the courthouse and the Heritage Museum of Montgomery County they make downtown Conroe a separate destination from the I-45 retail strip.