Hubbard TX

Before it was Hubbard it was McLainsboro, and before that people called it Slap-out. The Cotton Belt put a station here in 1881 and lots went on sale on the eleventh of August. The sixteenth governor of Texas turned up for it, and the town took his name. A bank opened the same year and so did two newspapers.

Then somebody drilling for water hit hot mineral water instead, better than three thousand feet down, and for a while Hubbard was a health resort — bathhouses, a sanatorium, people coming to sit in the water. The state's history puts the strike in 1895 and the marker on the well says 1894. The sanatorium building is still in town.

In 1888 a boy was born here named Tris Speaker. He hit .345 across twenty-two seasons, holds the record for doubles that nobody has touched since, and played centre field so shallow he could throw men out at second. They called him the Grey Eagle. There is a state marker in town that says only that this was his home town, which is about the right amount of fuss.

On the tenth of March, 1973, an F4 came through and took roughly a third of the city and half the business district with it. Six people were killed and seventy-seven hurt. The bank building went. The town had held two thousand people in the 1920s; it holds about fourteen hundred now.

Nine state markers stand within the town limits — two cemeteries, the Methodist church, the bank site, the school system, the newspaper, the mineral well, the town itself, and the ballplayer. For a place this size that is an unusual density of things somebody thought worth writing down.