Bosque County Texas map
31.90° N · 97.64° W · County seat: Meridian · 1,003 sq mi
Bosque County is limestone hill and ranch country between Waco and Fort Worth, cut through the middle by the river that gave it its name and edged on the east by the Brazos and Lake Whitney. It is also the center of Norwegian settlement in Texas: immigrants who followed Cleng Peerson here in the 1850s built stone churches at Norse and Cranfills Gap that are still standing.
Meridian is in the center of the county on SH-6 and SH-22. Clifton, the largest town, is nine miles southeast down SH-6; the Brazos and Lake Whitney form the eastern boundary.
Where Bosque County is
Seven counties surround it: Somervell north, Johnson northeast, Hill east, McLennan southeast, Coryell south, Hamilton west and Erath northwest.
The county sits in the gap between two metro areas. Waco is 38 miles southeast, Fort Worth 62 miles northeast and Arlington 65 miles in the same direction; Killeen is 54 miles south and Temple 58 miles southeast. I-35 runs down the far side of Hill County about 25 miles east of Meridian, and no interstate touches Bosque itself — traffic here is on state highways.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Clifton | City | 3,469 |
| Meridian | City (county seat) | 1,390 |
| Valley Mills (part) | City | 1,230 |
| Walnut Springs | City | 794 |
| Morgan | City | 448 |
| Iredell | City | 308 |
| Cranfills Gap | City | 276 |
Seven incorporated cities and no dominant one: the county seat is not the largest town, and together the seven hold under half the county's 18,235 residents. Valley Mills straddles the line into McLennan County, and the figure above counts only the Bosque County part. Kopperl, Laguna Park and Clifton's rural neighbors make up much of the rest.
Roads
- SH-6 – the main diagonal, running northwest to southeast through Iredell, Walnut Springs, Meridian, Clifton and Valley Mills, then on to Waco.
- SH-22 – crosses east–west through Meridian, west to Cranfills Gap and Hamilton, east to Whitney and Hillsboro.
- SH-144 – runs north from Meridian through Walnut Springs to Glen Rose in Somervell County.
- SH-174 – runs northeast from Meridian past Morgan toward Cleburne.
- SH-317 – leaves Valley Mills southward for China Spring, Waco and Belton.
The Norwegian settlement
Norwegian families began arriving in Bosque County in 1854, the year the county was created, and the migration was led and encouraged by Cleng Peerson, the promoter often called the father of Norwegian immigration to America. He spent his last years here and is buried at Norse, the rural community northwest of Clifton that became the heart of the settlement. Our Savior's Lutheran Church at Norse — the Old Rock Church — and St. Olaf's Kirke on the hill outside Cranfills Gap were both built of local limestone by those families in the 1880s, and both still stand in open pasture rather than in a town.
The Norwegian layer is still visible in the county: in surnames on mailboxes and headstones, in the lutefisk suppers, and in Clifton, which the legislature has recognized as the Norwegian Capital of Texas. The Bosque Museum in Clifton keeps the settlement's records alongside its other major holding, the material from Horn Shelter, a rock overhang on the Brazos where an unusually complete Paleoindian burial roughly eleven thousand years old was excavated.
Meridian State Park and the warbler
Meridian State Park lies a few miles southwest of the county seat on SH-22, built around a small lake by the Civilian Conservation Corps and opened in 1935; the CCC stonework in the refectory and along the shoreline is part of what people come to see. The park's steep juniper-and-oak slopes are prime nesting habitat for the golden-cheeked warbler, a small songbird that breeds nowhere in the world but central Texas and is listed as endangered. It needs the shredding bark of mature Ashe juniper to build its nest, which ties it to exactly this kind of hillside.
Meridian is one of the more reliable and accessible places to find the bird in March, April and May, and the park runs a marked trail loop through the warbler's territory. Birders arrive each spring from well outside Texas for it, which is a strange sort of tourism for a county otherwise built on cattle and hay.
Two rivers
The Bosque River runs down the middle of the county from north to south past Clifton and Valley Mills before joining the Brazos at Waco; bosque is Spanish for wooded, and the pecan and oak bottoms along the stream are what earned the name. On the county's eastern side the Brazos itself forms the boundary with Hill County, and Lake Whitney backs up behind its dam along that line, giving the county 20 square miles of water and a shoreline of camps and small resort communities around Laguna Park and Kopperl.
Between the two rivers the land is rolling limestone prairie broken by cedar breaks — good for grazing, thin for row crops. The county was cut from McLennan County in 1854 and named for its own river, one of the few Texas counties named for a landform rather than a person.