Hillsboro: Named for a Tennessee Surgeon

Hillsboro was born in the summer of eighteen fifty-three, when the Texas Legislature created Hill County out of Navarro County and needed a seat. A planter named Thomas Steiner donated two hundred twenty acres near the center of the county, and a special session of the commissioners selected the site in August of that year. They named it Hillsborough in honor of Dr.

George W. Hill, a Tennessee surgeon widely regarded as the first Anglo settler in what became Navarro County. In eighteen eighty-eight, the post office trimmed the spelling to Hillsboro.

The railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-one, and the town incorporated that same year. Hill County cotton and grain moved through Hillsboro's depot for decades, and the courthouse square anchored a commercial district that still shows its late nineteenth-century bones today. With about eight thousand residents, Hillsboro remains the county seat it has been since the year of its founding.