Hood

Hood, fourteen miles southwest of Gainesville in Cooke County, received its name from A. P. Hood, an early farmer in the area in whose house the first post office was located. He moved from Parker County to Cooke County in the early 1880s and settled first in Era. The Hood post office opened in 1889, and the community received its first major businesses in the early 1890s after Ira Cook divided his farm into town lots for resale. H. W. Williams built the first store; William Daniels ran the first blacksmith shop; and the Williams brothers, Matt, Bird, Steve, and Oscar, built and operated the first cotton gin. Hood reported a population of 161 in 1904. The community began to decline after it was bypassed by both the Missouri, Kansas and Texas line and U.S. Highway 82. In 1907 the Hood post office closed. During the mid-1930s Hood's population was estimated at 240; it remained at that level until the early 1940s, when it dropped to 100. It stayed at roughly 100 until the early 1970s, when it dropped again, to seventy-five. In 1988 scattered farmhouses and the Hood Community Center were all that remained at Hood. The community still had a population of seventy-five in 1990. By 2000 the population dropped to twenty.