Spring, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a railroad depot became a Cypress Creek suburb of over 60,000
More about this in Spring
Spring is a census-designated place in northern Harris County, inside Houston's extraterritorial jurisdiction, with a population of 62,559 as of the 2020 census. Most people who say they're "from Spring" mean the whole sprawling area the name has come to cover, not the original townsite — that's Old Town Spring, a roughly one-square-kilometer historic district at Spring-Cypress and Hardy roads. This page is a plain guide to the place, written for anyone who wants to understand Spring before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Spring, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town started
Long before Spring had a name of its own, the Orcoquiza Native Americans lived on this land. German immigrants began arriving in the mid-1840s, among them Gus Bayer and Carl Wunsche, and they farmed sugar cane and cotton along the creek that gave the town its name. The settlement stayed small until the railroad found it.
The railroad that built Spring
The International and Great Northern Railroad opened through the area in 1871, and the town grew around it. A second I-GN line connecting Spring to Fort Worth arrived in the early 1900s, turning the town into a genuine rail hub with its own roundhouse, 200 rail workers and 14 track yards, and a population that reached 1,200 by 1910. That boom didn't last — the roundhouse moved to Houston in 1923, and Spring's population fell back to around 300 within a decade.
Old Town Spring's second life
The old commercial core, largely abandoned after the railroad boom faded, found new purpose starting in 1980, when the Old Town Spring Association formed to promote the historic buildings as a shopping destination. By 1989 it had become a genuine tourist draw, and today Old Town Spring holds more than 150 shops, restaurants and art galleries, many inside buildings well over a century old.
From a few hundred residents to a modern suburb
Suburban growth reached Spring in earnest in the 1970s, as Houston expanded northward and new subdivisions filled in around the old town. By 1990 the broader Spring area had passed 33,000 residents, and it has kept growing since — helped along by ExxonMobil, whose 9,000-employee corporate campus opened next to the community in 2014 and became the company's global headquarters after a 2022-announced move from its former home in Irving, Texas.
Living with Cypress Creek
Cypress Creek runs through Spring, and it has flooded the area twice in recent memory at record or near-record levels: the Tax Day Flood of April 2016, its second-highest crest on record, damaged 1,735 homes in the watershed, and Hurricane Harvey in August 2017 pushed the creek to an all-time high, damaging 8,750 homes. Both events are tied in part to the pace of development in the watershed, which grew from about 18% built out in 1996 to 52% by 2018.
The ground and the sky above Spring
Spring sits on Beaumont clay, the same expansive, shrink-swell soil found across most of Harris County, which shifts with the seasons as it absorbs and releases moisture. And for over two decades, from 1969 to 1992, the Goodyear airship America was a genuine local landmark, flying in and out of a hangar visible from Interstate 45 before it relocated to Akron, Ohio.
That is Spring: a German farming settlement turned railroad town, nearly emptied out when the railroad moved on, and rebuilt since as one of Harris County's largest suburbs, still shaped by the creek that runs through the middle of it.