Sabine County organized Hemphill in 1858, naming it for Texas Supreme Court Justice John Hemphill. An election moved the county seat from Milam to the new settlement in the center of the county. Percy Beddoe surveyed and laid out the town site on an 80-acre tract owned by Richard Fendall Slaughter and his wife, Anna Holman Slaughter, and a post office was established there in 1859. A first courthouse was built soon after the community’s establishment, replaced in 1864 by another building that burned in 1875; another courthouse was completed in 1877 and was eventually replaced by the current structure in 1906. Early institutions included Sabine Valley University, established in 1879, First National Bank, which opened in 1907 and closed during the Great Depression, and Hemphill Common School District No. 1, which had three trustees, two teachers, and eighty-eight students by 1890. Hemphill’s population grew steadily between 1850 and 1930, largely because of the Knox Sawmill in the western part of town. After Temple Lumber Company bought the mill and it burned in 1937, and as post-World War II rural-to-urban migration and the lack of major thoroughfares affected the town, the population declined. Hemphill remains the seat of Sabine County government and home to several national, state, and local offices.