Bell County Texas map
31.04° N · 97.48° W · County seat: Belton · 1,090 sq mi
Bell County is the most populous county on I-35 between Austin and the Metroplex, and the reason sits on its western edge: Fort Hood, one of the largest army posts in the United States. Killeen grew up against the main gate, Temple grew up around a railroad shop and a hospital, and Belton, the smaller of the three, is still the county seat.
Belton sits in the middle with Temple to the east on I-35 and Killeen to the west on US-190. The two large water bodies are Belton Lake, north of Belton, and Stillhouse Hollow Lake, southwest of it.
Where Bell County is
The county sits on the line where the Blackland Prairie gives way to the limestone hills, halfway between Austin and Waco. Seven counties touch it: McLennan to the north, Falls northeast, Milam southeast, Williamson south, Burnet southwest, Lampasas west and Coryell northwest.
Waco is 40 miles northeast, Georgetown 31 miles southwest and Austin 56 miles southwest in a straight line. The county was created in 1850 out of Milam County and named for Peter Hansborough Bell, the third governor of Texas, who served from 1849 to 1853. The 2010 census put the centre of population of Texas inside Bell County, near the town of Holland in the southeast — the point at which the state's population would balance on a pin.
Bell County is the larger half of the Killeen–Temple metropolitan statistical area, which also takes in Coryell and Lampasas counties.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Killeen | City | 153,095 |
| Temple | City | 82,073 |
| Harker Heights | City | 33,090 |
| Belton | City (county seat) | 23,041 |
| Nolanville | City | 5,927 |
| Morgan's Point Resort | City | 4,642 |
| Salado | Village | 2,396 |
| Troy | City | 2,374 |
| Little River-Academy | City | 1,986 |
| Rogers | Town | 1,106 |
| Holland | Town | 1,077 |
| Bartlett (part) | City | 691 |
Killeen, Harker Heights and Nolanville run together as one built-up strip along US-190 east of the Fort Hood gate; Copperas Cove continues that strip into Coryell County. Morgan's Point Resort is a lakeside city on a peninsula in Belton Lake. Salado, on the old stagecoach road between Belton and Georgetown, incorporated as a village and keeps a nineteenth-century main street along Salado Creek. Bartlett straddles the line into Williamson County.
Interstates and the I-14 corridor
- I-35 – the north–south spine, through Troy, Temple, Belton and Salado; north to Waco and Dallas, south to Georgetown and Austin.
- I-14 / US-190 – the east–west route across the county, from Copperas Cove through Killeen, Harker Heights and Nolanville to the I-35 junction at Belton and on to Temple. This was signed as Interstate 14 in 2017, the first stretch of a proposed cross-state corridor.
- State Highway 36 – northwest from Temple toward Gatesville, southeast toward Cameron and Milam County.
- State Highway 195 – southwest from Killeen to Florence and Georgetown, the direct road between Fort Hood and I-35 south.
- State Highway 95 – the eastern county road through Holland and Bartlett.
- State Highway 53 and Loop 121 – Temple's east–west connector and Belton's loop.
Fort Hood
The post opened in 1942 as Camp Hood, a tank destroyer training centre. It was renamed Fort Cavazos in 2023 and changed back to Fort Hood in 2025. The cantonment area — the barracks, motor pools, headquarters and airfields where soldiers actually live and work — lies inside Bell County directly west of Killeen. The training land, which is the great majority of the reservation's acreage, runs west and north into Coryell County.
The post is the largest employer in Central Texas by a wide margin and the reason Killeen is more than twice the size of the county seat. Robert Gray Army Airfield on the reservation doubles as Killeen–Fort Hood Regional Airport, the commercial airport for the county.
Belton Lake and Stillhouse Hollow
Two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoirs account for most of the county's 36 square miles of water. Belton Lake dams the Leon River northwest of Belton, with its shoreline reaching up against the southern edge of the Fort Hood training area; Morgan's Point Resort and a string of Corps parks sit on its southern side. Stillhouse Hollow Lake dams the Lampasas River southwest of Belton, off US-190 toward Lampasas.
Below the two dams the Leon and the Lampasas join to form the Little River, which crosses the southeastern corner of the county on its way to the Brazos. The pair supply municipal water for Killeen, Temple, Belton and Harker Heights, which is why a county with only a few small natural lakes is one of the better-watered in Central Texas.
The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, founded in 1845 and one of the oldest universities in Texas, has its campus in Belton. Temple College is in Temple, alongside the Baylor Scott & White medical campus that grew out of the Temple sanitarium opened in the 1890s.