The Town was named after John Hemphill, an early Texas judge and legal scholar, and later a United States senator.

[citation needed] As of the 2020 United States census, there were 1,029 people, 469 households, and 313 families residing in the city.

On Christmas night 1987, Loyal Garner Jr. of Florien, Louisiana, a 34-year-old African-American truck driver and married father of six, was arrested with two companions for alleged drunk driving in Sabine County.

Garner was taken for treatment to a local hospital and then to one in the city of Tyler, Texas, seat of Smith County, where he died after neurosurgery.

Officials in Tyler thought the death suspicious, as an autopsy showed evidence of beating, and they refused to return the body to Hemphill until completing their own investigation.

Ladner and two sheriff deputies were tried in Hemphill of violating Garner's civil rights and acquitted, to cheers by whites in the courtroom.

They conducted their first civil rights protest after Ladner's acquittal, and founded the first chapter here of the NAACP.

The circumstances of Garner's death and the two trials of Hemphill law enforcement officers had attracted national media attention.

[11][12][13][14] In February 2003, the town and its vicinity were one of the key search areas for wreckage from the Space Shuttle Columbia after it broke up over Texas.

Search teams recovered some of the remains of the shuttle and crew members,[15] and the Orbiter Experiment Support System recorder (OEX) was found near Hemphill.

[19] The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters.