Hitchcock: A Widow's Bargain with the Railroad

Hitchcock owes its name to a widow's real estate deal. The area was settled around eighteen forty-six, first by Jonas Butler and later by French immigrants along Highland Bayou, and it went by the name Highland for its position on the bayou's high banks. In eighteen seventy-three, when the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway needed a station about fourteen miles out of Galveston, Emily Hitchcock stepped forward.

She was the widow of Lent Munson Hitchcock, a prominent Galveston civic leader, and she offered a four-hundred-fifty-foot-wide strip of land stretching from Cow Gully east to the section house, free of charge, on one condition: the railroad had to name the town after her husband. The railroad agreed, the station opened, and the name Hitchcock has held ever since.