North Houston, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a Harris County railroad stop rose, faded, and was replaced by a modern corridor
More about this in North Houston
North Houston sits about ten miles northwest of downtown Houston in central Harris County, and almost none of it is actually inside the city of Houston. It's an unincorporated stretch of the county built along the State Highway 249 corridor, and its story is unusual even by Texas standards: the place had already lived through two other names and one near-disappearance before the neighborhood people drive through today was ever built. For the full record, the Handbook of Texas entry on North Houston is the primary source for its early history.
A town that changed its name twice before it had residents
The site was first known as Tomball, honoring Thomas Henry Ball — a name with no connection to the present-day city of Tomball many miles to the northwest, which took its own name from the same man years later. When a Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway station stop went in here in 1907, the name changed again, to Scoville. A post office followed in 1908 under that name, only to be replaced in 1910 by a new one called North Houston. That post office ran until 1928, when it closed and mail for the area started coming instead from Fairbanks.
A railroad stop that never grew into a town
Unlike the master-planned communities and incorporated cities that surround it today, North Houston never became much more than a rail stop. By 1914 the whole townsite amounted to a single general store. State highway maps drawn in 1936 still showed just one building at the site. Oil turned up nearby in 1939, but it wasn't enough to build a town around. By the 1980s, the Handbook of Texas records that all that remained of the original settlement were two abandoned railroad stations and a scattering of houses — the place had effectively stopped existing as a functioning community in its own right.
The corridor that replaced it
What carries the North Houston name today is a different, newer stretch of Harris County built up along State Highway 249, a road that got its current number in 1988 after decades as FM 149 — the same highway the Handbook cites as the boundary of the old, mostly abandoned townsite. The area is served by the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, and its most visible modern landmark is the Harris County Sheriff's Office "249 Storefront," a community policing office on Fallbrook Drive.
The ground itself, by the numbers
Most of what's called North Houston today falls inside ZIP code 77086, and that ZIP code tells its own story about how the area actually developed: only about 15.8% of it lies inside the Houston city limits, with the rest remaining unincorporated Harris County the way the original townsite always was. The ZIP holds 9,617 houses and condos plus 4,141 renter-occupied apartments, built in two distinct waves rather than one steady stretch — a large batch from the 1970s and a second one from the 2000s. Fallbrook Road, one of the area's own streets, runs to Halls Bayou, the drainage channel nearest the community, giving North Houston a direct, low-lying tie to Harris County's flood-control network even though the place itself is easy to drive through without ever knowing its name.
That's North Houston: a railroad stop that was Tomball, then Scoville, then a town that quietly stopped existing, now standing in for a modern Harris County corridor built on largely the same ground.