WILLOW, TEXAS. Willow, near the point at which Farm Road 2920 crosses Willow Creek one mile southeast of Tomball in northern Harris County, was named for the creek. The earliest known settler in the area was Claude Nicholas Pillot, who established a farm in the vicinity in 1837. The community's Methodist, Brethren, and Baptist churches drew residents who lived along Willow Creek. Some residents were of Scottish or English ancestry, but the town was also the center of a French settlement, and the population increased with the arrival of immigrants in the 1870s. In 1905 the local school had forty-one students and one teacher. At one time Willow had a Grange hall, but by the 1990s Willow Creek Cemetery west of David Wayne Hooks Memorial Airport and an abandoned railway station remained at the townsite.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Heritage of North Harris County (n.p: North Harris County Branch, American Association of University Women, 1977).
