Hitchcock Depot

Hitchcock's name comes from a bargain, or so the story goes. The Handbook of Texas says the town was renamed around 1873, when Emily Hitchcock, widow of Lent M. Hitchcock, offered a tract 450 feet wide running from Cow Gully east to the section house if the railroad would name the place for her husband. The plaque dates the deal to 1875 and calls it oral tradition. Before that the community was Highland. A post office opened in 1884 as Hitchcock's, and Thomas King platted the town about 1891.

What the plaque says

Hitchcock Depot According to local oral tradition, the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad (GCSF) gained a vital right-of-way through Emily Hitchcock's property in 1875 by agreeing to establish a depot named for her deceased husband, Lent Munson Hitchcock. GCSF platted the town of Hitchcock in 1891. The depot, built by 1893, became a social center as passengers, freight, and agricultural produce moved past its doors. This structure, the last of this area's GCSF depots still standing, was relocated here by the Santa Fe Area Historical Foundation in 1975 and converted for museum use in 1982. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Galveston Island State Park — 13 mi
  A cattle ranch willed to the state that now runs the full width of Galveston Island, from two miles of Gulf beach across dunes and prairie to the marshes of West Galveston Bay.
• Space Center Houston — 13 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Galveston Seawall and the 1900 Storm — 17 mi
  The concrete wall along the Gulf that Galveston built after the hurricane of September 8, 1900, which killed between 6,000 and 8,000 people in a city of 38,000.
• Moody Mansion — 17 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.

More markers nearby

• Original Site of First Baptist Church of Alta Loma — 0.8 mi
• U. S. Naval Air Station (Blimp Base) — 1.5 mi
• City of Hitchcock — 2.3 mi
• Dairy Industry in the Santa Fe Area — 3.1 mi