Before it was Hubbard it was McLainsboro, and before that people called it Slap-out.¹ The story goes that a storekeeper here was forever slap out of whatever you came in for.² In 1881 the Cotton Belt put a station here. The residents met to organize a town, Richard B. Hubbard, governor of Texas from 1876 to 1879, was there, and the town took his name.³ A private bank opened that year,⁴ and so did two newspapers, the Texas Pick and Pan and the Hubbard City News.⁵ The News was started by S. H. Sayer, who had come to Texas with the New York colony at Rice and left his farm there for the newspaper business.⁶

Then a well drilled for water hit hot mineral water at 3,100 feet, and for a while Hubbard was a health resort.⁷ Local businessmen built a bathhouse at the well in 1907, and in 1915 two brothers, Doctors John and Will Wood, opened a fourteen-bed brick hospital nearby. Patients came from around the nation for a twenty-one-day course of treatment.⁸ The marker on the well says the water came in 1894; the state's history says 1895.⁹ The bathhouse closed about 1930 and burned in 1934, and the Woods' hospital became apartments.¹⁰

In 1888 a boy was born here named Tris Speaker.¹¹ He batted .345 over twenty-two seasons in the major leagues and retired with more doubles than anyone in history, 792, a record that still stands.¹² He played center field so shallow that he led American League center fielders in assists eight times.¹³ They called him the Grey Eagle, and in 1937 he became the first Texan in the Baseball Hall of Fame.¹⁴ The state marker at City Hall says he always came home to Hubbard, where he was a lifetime member of the volunteer fire department.¹⁵ He is buried here, in Fairview Cemetery.¹⁶

On the morning of March 10, 1973, a tornado rated F4 came up from Mart and ended in Hubbard.¹⁷ Six people were killed and at least seventy-seven were hurt.¹⁸ Thirty homes were demolished and half the buildings in town were damaged.¹⁹ The old stone bank building went, and so did the City News office.²⁰ The town had held about twenty-seven hundred people in 1925;²¹ it held 1,394 at the last census.²²

A dozen state markers stand in and around Hubbard: the town itself, the ballplayer, the mineral well, the bank site, the newspaper, the Methodist church, the high school, three old houses and two cemeteries.²³ For a place this size that is an unusual number of things somebody thought worth writing down.