Killeen

Killeen is a city in Bell County, Central Texas, on the plains between Austin and Waco. It lies beside Fort Cavazos, formerly Fort Hood, one of the main posts of the United States Army, and many of its people serve there or are military families.

The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway laid out the town in 1882 and named it after Frank P. Killeen, one of its officials. For its first decades Killeen was a market town for cotton, corn and cattle from the surrounding farms. In 1942 the army opened Camp Hood on the land west of the town, and Killeen grew from a small farm town into one of the main cities of Central Texas. The post was named after the general John Bell Hood and was renamed in the 2020s after Richard Cavazos, the first Hispanic four-star general of the army.

Fort Cavazos is the main employer of the area, with civilian workers as well as soldiers. The Killeen–Fort Hood Regional Airport shares its runway with the army airfield of the post. Cattle ranches still cover the hills of the county outside the city.

Texas A&M University–Central Texas, opened in the late 2000s, has a campus on the south side of the city. Central Texas College, founded in the 1960s, runs campuses for soldiers on army posts around the world. Stillhouse Hollow Lake and Belton Lake, reservoirs to the east, are used for boating, fishing and camping. Families of soldiers from Korea, Germany and Puerto Rico have brought restaurants and shops of their homelands to the streets of the city. The Killeen Civic and Conference Center holds concerts, trade shows and the city's festivals.