Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Whitney, TX

Whitney is a city in western Hill County, Texas, at State Highway 22 and Farm Roads 933 and 1244, about 3 miles east of Lake Whitney and 12 miles southwest of Hillsboro, the county seat.

Whitney was established in 1876 when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad built through Hill County, and its town lots were auctioned from a wagon at the future depot site on November 25, 1879.

The city was named for Charles A. Whitney, a principal stockholder in the Houston and Texas Central Railroad and the son-in-law of railroad magnate Charles Morgan.

Whitney's fate was transformed by the Whitney Dam and Reservoir Project of 1944-1953 - dam construction briefly swelled the town to 1,379 people by 1950, but the completed Lake Whitney inundated about 15,800 acres of local farmland and the population fell back to 1,050 by 1960.

The Lake Whitney Association was organized in 1951 to promote the new lake, tourism rebuilt the town's economy, and Whitney is still promoted as the 'Getaway Capital of Texas,' with Lake Whitney State Park a few miles west of town.

In 1949 Whitney settled a dispute over the whittling bench outside its drugstore - where local old men gathered to spit, whittle, and damn the modern world - with a special municipal election on July 30, 1949, in which voters restored the bench by 124 votes to 67, in what became known as the Battle of the Benches.

The last train passed through Whitney in 1967, ending the railroad era that had created the town nearly a century earlier.

The 2020 census counted 1,992 people, 762 households, and 497 families in Whitney, down slightly from 2,087 people in 2010, and the Texas State Historical Association reported 332 businesses in the town in 2023.

Country musician Tommy Duncan, a founding member of Bob Wills's Texas Playboys, came from Whitney.