Austin County Texas map

The county lies west of Houston on the coastal plain, between the Brazos and the Colorado. Houston is 55 miles east in a straight line, Sugar Land 42 miles southeast and Bryan 54 miles north. Six counties border it: Washington to the north, Waller east, Fort Bend southeast, Wharton south, Colorado southwest and Fayette west.

The Brazos River makes the eastern boundary with Waller and Fort Bend counties; the San Bernard River runs along the southwestern side. Between them the country is gently rolling prairie and post oak, cut by Mill Creek and Cummins Creek, and given over to cattle, hay and rice on the southern end.

Two main roads carry the traffic. I-10 crosses the southeast corner through Sealy and San Felipe, and US-290 — the other Houston-to-Austin route — runs across Waller and Washington counties just to the north, which puts Austin County in the block of farmland between the two highways.

Austin was one of the twenty-three original counties created when the Republic of Texas replaced the Mexican municipalities in 1836, and it takes its name from Stephen F. Austin, the empresario who brought the first authorised Anglo-American colonists into Texas in the 1820s. The municipality it replaced was centred on San Felipe de Austin, laid out in 1823 on the west bank of the Brazos as the administrative town of Austin's colony — the place where the colony's land grants were issued, where the Consultation of 1835 met, and where the first English-language newspaper in Texas was printed.

San Felipe was burned in March 1836 as Sam Houston's army retreated ahead of the Mexican advance, and it never regained its position; the county seat moved to Bellville in 1848. The site is now the San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site, with a museum on the town's excavated footprint, and Stephen F. Austin State Park adjoins it on the river with camping and trails in the Brazos bottom.

Later settlement was heavily German and Czech. Industry, in the northwest of the county, was founded by Friedrich Ernst in 1831 and is generally counted as the first German settlement in Texas; the letters Ernst sent home helped start the wave of German immigration that shaped this part of the state.

Sealy, on I-10 at the SH-36 junction, is the largest town and the county's commercial centre. It is also the origin of a household name: a Sealy cabinetmaker named Daniel Haynes began making cotton-filled mattresses there in the 1880s, licensed the design to other makers, and the product was sold as the mattress "from Sealy" until the town's name became the brand. Wallis and South Frydek in the southeast are Czech-founded farming communities, and Brazos Country is a residential municipality near the river on the Houston side.