Ghost Hill

Ghost Hill was one of the names of Trumbull, a railroad community on the Houston and Texas Central between Palmer and Ferris, and it came from deaths on the tracks. The railroad put in a switch at the site in 1872, and the place was first known simply as Switch. According to the Handbook of Texas it was later called Ghost Hill, apparently for three ranch hands who were killed there by a train. An Ellis County local history drawn from residents' recollections tells it differently: the dead were three Mexican men believed to be railroad section hands, buried in a grove west of the tracks near the home of J. E. Smith with their graves marked by two steel rails, and an engineer named Valley hung a red lantern outside his engine whenever he passed.

The community was later called Mackie and then Clemma, the name under which Henry Harkey established the first settlement of any size in 1886. On 20 April 1904 it was renamed Trumbull, for J. A. Trumbull, a railroad official. The railroad carried away the cotton, corn and alfalfa of the nearby farms, and by the same local history the town had a bank building, a row of stores facing the tracks, doctors, two cotton gins, and a stop on the Texas Electric interurban whose station was a three-sided building. Trumbull had about 150 people in 1925 and seven businesses in 1933. In 1954 John Toal set up a plant there that designed and built plows, spray tanks and other farm equipment, which his sons ran until 1983. By 1986 the town had no businesses at all, and its population was sixty-five in 1990 and in 2000.