Biohazard Cleanup Near West Hemphill Hemphill, TX

Hemphill is a small city and the county seat of Sabine County, deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas on the Louisiana border.

Sabine County, organized December 14, 1837, is one of the original counties of the Republic of Texas and is named for the Sabine River, which forms its eastern boundary.

Hemphill exists because Sabine County voters decided in 1858 to move the county seat from Milam to a more central site; the new town was laid out in 1859 and received its post office that July.

The town is named for John Hemphill, an early Texas judge and legal scholar who later became a United States senator.

Hemphill got its rail connection in 1912, when the Lufkin, Hemphill and Gulf Railway arrived to serve the area's lumber operations, though the line was abandoned by 1938 as the sawmills closed.

The city is surrounded by the Sabine National Forest and serves as a gateway to Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Sabine River, one of the largest man-made lakes in the United States and a nationally known bass-fishing destination.

When the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart over East Texas on February 1, 2003, Hemphill was one of the key search areas, and local residents helped NASA recover more than 80,000 pieces of debris.

The Patricia Huffman Smith NASA Museum, subtitled 'Remembering Columbia,' opened in Hemphill on February 1, 2011, memorializing the Columbia crew and the community's role in the recovery effort.

Hemphill sits 484 miles from Hemphill County in the Texas Panhandle — the largest separation in Texas between a city and a county of the same name.

Hemphill had 1,106 residents and 467 households at the 2000 census, and its population was 1,029 at the 2020 census.