Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Itasca Itasca, TX

Itasca, in Hill County, began in 1881 as a station on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, the Katy line, and its town lots were first sold on October 10, 1881.

Itasca was named not for anything in Texas but for Lake Itasca in Minnesota, the headwaters lake of the Mississippi River.

The young railroad town incorporated in 1885 and boomed with cotton, reaching a population of about 2,500 by 1906.

The Itasca Cotton Manufacturing Company, organized in 1901, was the town's industrial anchor for six decades, and its sale in 1962 set off the decline of the local cotton economy.

Hill County Electric Cooperative, founded in Itasca in 1937, was only the third electric cooperative established in the United States under the Rural Electrification Act.

Itasca's official motto is 'The Big Little Town,' a slogan the city displays on its signs and website.

Itasca sits on Interstate 35W at roughly the midway point between Fort Worth and Waco, covering just 1.24 square miles.

Itasca had 1,562 residents at the 2020 Census, living in 537 households, with about 40 percent of the population identifying as Hispanic or Latino.

Itasca High School's teams are the Wampus Cats, named for a mythical creature after a post-game locker-room shout in the late 1920s; the nickname is so unusual that it has been profiled by ESPN and The New York Times.

Willie Nelson's 1984 film Songwriter includes a joke about going to 'a weavers convention in Itasca, Texas,' a nod to the town's old cotton-mill days.