In 1882, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad began building a line between Waco and Taylor, which eventually required a switch six miles from Waco. The site chosen as the stop along the line was owned by the estate of John H. Brower, a shipping magnate who had once been the Consul of the Republic of Texas in New York. His estate was entrusted to his son-in-law, Thomas B. Hewitt, a Yale-educated corporate attorney and KATY employee, and John Blydenburgh. The MKT named the switch station Hewitt in his honor, and the town was born.
John Allison Warren, a local farmer and business owner, bought 40 acres from the John H. Brower estate in 1893 for $4911.83. He filed a city plat, keeping Hewitt as the name that the railway had given the switch. Warren gave away a lot of land in exchange to those who bought lumber and supplies from his lumberyard.
While Warren encouraged a settlement of the land, a community had already sprung up in the area before the railroad. It is commonly accepted that Major Isham Earle was one of, if not the first settler, who arrived in Hewitt in 1867, after being displaced from his cotton mill in Waco.
During the following decades, the community flourished on farming and agriculture during the days when “cotton was king.” Hewitt was growing slowly but steadily until the late 1970s when the population exploded. The steady upward growth that continued for more than a century gave way to a 700 percent population boom. In 1890, 60 residents called Hewitt home, with approximately 13,000 finding the town the place to be today.