Spring Hill

Spring Hill is on Farm Road 709 near Navarro Mills Lake twenty miles west of Corsicana in southwest Navarro County. The townsite was first settled in 1837 when George Washington Hill, an Indian agent appointed by Sam Houston, built a trading post near a local spring. In 1839 a surveying party of twenty-four men camped around Hill's trading post were attacked by Kickapoo Indians. Sixteen of the surveyors were killed in a battle that lasted thirteen hours. A party organized in Franklin to return and bury the dead found only bones, wolves having eaten the bodies; the party buried the bones in a common grave. The following year families began settling around the post; they named their community Spring Hill after its first settler and because of springs in the area. In 1849 the Spring Hill post office began operation, and a year later a rawhide building was erected for a church and school. The town prospered until the Houston and Texas Central Railway bypassed it and built lines through Corsicana in 1871. The post office closed in 1906, when Spring Hill had one school with seventy-one students and one teacher. In the 1930s the town had a church, two businesses, and a few scattered dwellings. It had a population of forty in 1939. From 1953 through 2000 the population was recorded as sixty.