Johnson County Texas map
32.38° N · 97.37° W · County seat: Cleburne · 734 sq mi
Johnson County is Fort Worth's southern doorstep: Burleson and Joshua run straight into the city limits, and two fast roads — I-35W and the Chisholm Trail Parkway — carry the commute. Beneath all of it lies the Barnett Shale, which turned the county into one of the busiest gas fields in Texas in the 2000s.
Centered on Johnson County. The pin marks Cleburne; Burleson and Joshua sit at the top of the county against the Tarrant County line.
Where Johnson County is
Fort Worth is 26 miles north of the county's centre and shares its whole northern boundary through Tarrant County. Clockwise from there: Ellis east, Hill south, Bosque and Somervell southwest, Hood west and Parker northwest.
The county was assembled in 1854 out of pieces of Ellis, Hill and Navarro counties and named for Middleton Tate Johnson, a Texas Ranger captain and Republic of Texas senator who had settled near what is now Arlington. It straddles two landscapes: Blackland Prairie on the eastern side toward Alvarado and Grandview, and the broken sandstone and oak of the Eastern Cross Timbers on the west toward Godley and the Brazos.
Johnson County is part of the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area, and it is growing hard — from 179,927 in 2020 to a 2024 Census estimate above 210,000. Arlington is 29 miles northeast and Dallas 43 miles northeast. Central Time; 6th congressional district.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Burleson (part) | City | 38,457 |
| Cleburne (county seat) | City | 31,287 |
| Joshua | City | 7,905 |
| Keene | City | 6,417 |
| Alvarado | City | 5,361 |
| Mansfield (part) | City | 4,742 |
| Venus (part) | Town | 4,136 |
| Grandview | City | 1,863 |
| Godley | City | 1,460 |
| Rio Vista | City | 1,049 |
| Briaroaks | City | 500 |
| Cross Timber | Town | 441 |
| Coyote Flats | City | 275 |
| Cresson (part) | City | 116 |
Burleson, Mansfield, Venus and Cresson all cross county lines; the figures above count only the Johnson County side. Burleson is larger than Cleburne overall but is not the county seat.
Roads
- Interstate 35W – runs the length of the eastern county from Burleson through Alvarado and Grandview to the Hill County line, where it merges with I-35E traffic at Hillsboro.
- Chisholm Trail Parkway – the toll expressway opened in 2014, running from downtown Fort Worth southwest through the Cross Timbers to end at US-67 in Cleburne. It gave the county seat a second fast route to the city.
- U.S. 67 – the east–west road through Cleburne, west toward Glen Rose and east through Alvarado to Midlothian.
- U.S. 287 – crosses the northeast corner through Venus toward Waxahachie.
- U.S. 377 – clips the northwest corner at Cresson on the way from Fort Worth to Granbury.
- SH-174 – the old Burleson–Joshua–Cleburne road, continuing south through Rio Vista.
- SH-171 – west from Cleburne to Granbury, southeast toward Hillsboro.
- SH-81 – the former US-81, paralleling I-35W through Alvarado and Grandview.
Cleburne
Cleburne began as Camp Henderson, a Civil War-era muster ground, and was renamed for Patrick Cleburne, an Irish-born Confederate general. What made it a real town was the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway, which put its major repair shops there at the end of the 1890s; for most of the twentieth century the shops were the largest employer in the county and the reason Cleburne had a labour force at all. Freight railroading is still visible in the town's layout, and the 1912 Johnson County courthouse stands on the square a few blocks from the tracks.
Cleburne State Park, about 10 miles southwest of town, surrounds a spring-fed lake built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps in a limestone canyon. Keene, just north of Cleburne, grew up around a Seventh-day Adventist school that is now Southwestern Adventist University.
The Barnett Shale
The Barnett Shale is a deep, tight gas formation under Tarrant, Denton, Wise and Johnson counties. It had been known for decades but was not economic until horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were combined in the late 1990s, and the drilling boom that followed put thousands of wells across the region. Johnson County was among the top gas producers in Texas through the late 2000s, with pads, compressor stations and pipeline right-of-way scattered between the subdivisions. Drilling slowed sharply when gas prices fell, but the wells, the mineral leases and the pipeline network remain part of the county's landscape and its tax base.