Hitchcock

Hitchcock, also known as Hitchcock's and as Highland, is an incorporated community fourteen miles northwest of Galveston on State Highway 6, Farm roads 519 and 2004, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line in southwestern Galveston County. The area was settled around 1846. On May 31, 1848, Jonas Butler acquired a league of land on Highland Bayou and built a house, part of which still stood in the 1940s. Butler was followed by a group of French settlers, who established homes on the bayou. The community was originally known as Highland for its location on the bayou's high banks. Travelers used the bayou to reach Galveston until the 1870s, when the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway built through the settlement. The town was renamed around 1873, when Emily Hitchcock, widow of Galveston civic leader Lent M. Hitchcock , offered a 450-foot-wide tract from Cow Gully east to the section house for a townsite if the railroad would name the community for her husband. Local farmers shipped cattle and vegetables. A post office was established in 1884 under the name Hitchcock's, later shortened to Hitchcock. Thomas King platted the townsite around 1891, and by 1892 the community reported a population of 275, two grocers, and several fruit growers and commission merchants. Farmers later marketed their vegetables through a cooperative association. A local public school opened in 1894, and by 1907 the town had two schools, one with eighty-nine white pupils and two teachers and one with thirty-seven black pupils and one teacher. In 1914 Hitchcock had a bank, a hotel, a blacksmith, three general stores, and a population of 550. The town began to decline with the end of local truck farming after 1920. Most local packing houses closed, many residents moved to find work in Texas City, and by 1925 Hitchcock's population had fallen to 350.