It is located approximately halfway between Waco and Bryan-College Station at the intersection of Texas State Highway 6 and Farm to Market Roads 979 and 1644, on the Southern Pacific line, nine miles north of Hearne, in west central Robertson County.

[5] The town is named for Robert Calvert,[4] an early settler who served in the Texas Legislature representing Robertson and Milam counties.

[6] The earliest known white settler in the area was Joseph Harlan, whose 1837 land grant laid five miles south of what is now the City of Calvert.

The first trains arrived in Calvert in 1869, and the town was incorporated the next year with an aldermanic form of municipal government.

After the railroad made Calvert the major trading center of the area, it was reported that: It was a common sight to see six or eight wagons drawn by oxen slowly passing through the one and only street of these towns en route to Houston to dispose of their cotton.

The team-masters usually owned their teams and were paid so much per hundred pounds for hauling freight.

The Handbook of Texas cites the 1871 date, while a 1931 Frontier Times piece on Calvert places the building of the gin by John H. Gibson as 1876.

An early judge, in speaking about the epidemic, noted: The disease was brought to town by a traveling printer from Louisiana where the fever was raging.

The trains were not allowed to stop in Calvert then and the windows of the coaches were closed until they were far out of town.

[9] In December 2010, all three members of the town's police department resigned over a conflict with the city council.

[10] In June 2015, a TV station reported that cities of Calvert, Franklin, Hearne and Lott, in a "Texas Triangle", were using their police departments to issue numerous speeding tickets to turn their municipal court into a "cash cow".

As of the 2020 United States census, there were 962 people, 585 households, and 470 families residing in the city.

As of the 2010 United States census, there were 1,192 people, 509 households, and 374 families residing in the city.

[9] A former Calvert mayor, Briscoe Rowell Cain, Sr. (1931–2011), was the grandfather of Texas State Representative, House District 128, Republican Briscoe Cain, III, a lawyer from Harris County.