24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Hitchcock, TX

Hitchcock is a city in Galveston County, Texas, that began in the mid-1840s as Highland, a settlement on the high bank of Highland Bayou where Jonas Butler acquired a league of land in 1848.

The town got its current name in 1873, when Emily Hitchcock, widow of Galveston civic leader Lent M. Hitchcock, donated land to the railroad on the condition that its new station be named for her late husband.

Around the turn of the 20th century Hitchcock was a thriving vegetable-shipping center, but insect plagues in the 1930s wrecked the local truck-farming economy and the area stayed poor until World War II.

During World War II the area hosted Camp Wallace, an anti-aircraft training base built for more than 10,000 personnel, and Naval Air Station Hitchcock, a blimp base used to hunt German submarines threatening Gulf oil tankers.

Hitchcock incorporated on January 30, 1960, during a postwar population boom that pushed it to nearly 7,000 residents by 1968.

Hitchcock had a population of 7,301 at the 2020 census, in about 2,712 households, with roughly 68% of homes owner-occupied and an average of 2.78 people per household.

Hitchcock sprawls across roughly 92 square miles of the Galveston County mainland, about a third of it water, making it one of the most spread-out small cities on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Today Hitchcock is a residential suburb of Galveston, about 10 miles northwest of the island and 30 miles south of Houston, and many residents work at area petrochemical plants or commute to jobs tied to the Johnson Space Center.

The community's first post office opened in 1884 under the name Hitchcock's, later shortened to Hitchcock, and the town was platted in 1891.