Walnut Springs sits in the rolling ranch country of northern Bosque County, at the junction of State Highway 144 and Farm Roads 927 and 203, about fifty-two miles northwest of Waco. The 2020 census counted 795 residents, making it one of several small, rural cities scattered across the county. It lies about seven miles south of Glen Rose and roughly seven miles north of Meridian, the county seat, in a landscape of wooded creek bottoms, pasture, and low hills. The community was founded in 1861 and named Walnut for a nearby spring surrounded by walnut trees; a post office followed in 1883, and the name became Walnut Springs in 1892. The town's defining growth came in the 1880s, when the Texas Central Railroad arrived and made Walnut Springs a divisional headquarters — a boom that drew machine shops, workers, and commerce. Central College, founded in 1885 and absorbed into the public school system in 1892, marked the community's early investment in education. The boom proved fragile. A fire destroyed the railroad's machine shops in the 1920s, and the company did not rebuild; the railroad was eventually discontinued. The town's population, estimated near 1,400 in the mid-1920s, slid through the following decades to a few hundred by the early 1960s. Walnut Springs saw renewed growth in the late 1970s, when the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Station was under construction near Glen Rose and workers and families moved into the area, before settling back into a small-town equilibrium. Today Walnut Springs is a quiet agricultural community governed as a General Law city. The Walnut Springs Independent School District anchors civic life, and the surrounding countryside remains dominated by ranches and farmland. Residents are drawn by the low-key pace, the affordability of rural Bosque County, and access to Waco and the Fort Worth area along the region's highways, while newcomers increasingly include people seeking rural property within reach of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex.