24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near South Hamlin Hamlin, TX

Hamlin was named for W. H. Hamlin, an official of the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway, after R. D. Moore conveyed the land for its townsite in 1902.

The town was organized in 1905 and incorporated in 1907; the Orient railroad reached Hamlin in 1906, followed by the Texas Central and then the Abilene and Southern in 1910, making the young town a three-railroad shipping point.

The first gypsum plant in Jones County was built six miles outside Hamlin in 1903, three years before the first train arrived.

Hamlin boomed on rail traffic, cotton gins, and a cottonseed oil mill, and the discovery of oil nearby in 1928 added another pillar to its economy.

The Hamlin Herald, first published in 1906, is still in print, chronicling the town for well over a century.

Hamlin Memorial Hospital opened in 1948 as the town's first hospital, and it remains its only one, operated today by the Hamlin Hospital District.

Hamlin's population peaked at 3,791 in the 1960 Census and has declined steadily since, standing at 1,831 residents at the 2020 Census.

The 2020 Census counted 737 households and 1,025 housing units in Hamlin, a notably older community where one in five residents was 65 or older.

Hamlin straddles the Jones-Fisher county line on U.S. Highway 83, and its Jones County portion belongs to the Abilene metropolitan area.

Hamlin High School's teams are the Pied Pipers, a mascot borrowed from Hamelin, Germany, of Pied Piper fairy-tale fame and reportedly chosen by the school's first football coach in 1921; USA Today has picked it as Texas's most amusing high school mascot.