(A brief history published in the first Annual
from Borger High School in 1928. Author unknown.)

      Borger may be compared to a mushroom, which, it is said, springs up over night. About four years ago the land on which Borger is now located was an open, grass-covered prairie; a cattle country. Not more than a half a dozen people inhabited the area now included in the Borger oil field. A few years earlier, about 1897, the land of the Borger region, about half of which was school land, was offered for sale on easy terms at about a dollar per acre. During earlier years but one family, Mr. and Mrs. Billie Dixon, lived in what is now Hutchinson County. They kept the post office near historic Adobe Walls, the scene of a famous battle between Indians and buffalo hunters in 1874.

     The plains continued to be nearly uninhabited until one morning the sun peeped over the horizon at a growing city on the crest of Dixon Creek canyon. The howling coyote was held at bay, and the grassy prairie was changed into a flourishing little city. The history of this city and the men who made it reads like fiction. The two men responsible for the city were A. P. Borger and J. R. Miller. Mr. Borger came to what is now Borger from Cromwell, Oklahoma, in January 1926, to look over the land in the view of establishing a town. He returned to Oklahoma, but soon came back with J. R. Miller and decided upon the proper location, provided it could be purchased. After finding the land belonged to Mr. J. F. Weatherly of Panhandle, Texas, they persuaded the owner to sell two hundred forty acres at the remarkable price of fifty dollars an acre. This land was immediately divided into lots and sold on March 8, 1926.  The property which had been bought for $12,000 was sold for several thousand dollars profit. The town was named for the founder, Mr. Borger. At this time there were from eighty to one hundred new oil wells in northern Carson and southern Hutchinson counties. 

     Within ninety days after the town was located, the population grew to thirty thousand. Many undesirable people came to Borger, giving it the name of the toughest city in the United States. Borger consisted of shacks and tents sprawling over the hills. There were people of every description and from every state in the Union, seeking riches, or adventure. The task of organizing an incorporated town out of all these gold seeking prospectors, with the evil and vice that follows, was indeed a colossal one. 

     Some idea of the town in its early stages may be gained from the following facts. All material used in the oil field had to be hauled from Panhandle, twenty-five miles away. Thousands of trucks were used, running day and night. The estimated population at the end of eight months was 35,000. The townsite office was used for a post office, a telephone office, and community center. For days there was no post office. Mr. Miller himself brought out the mail from Panhandle for several weeks, and distributed it at the townsite office. The one telephone line was an extension from Pantex to a Panhandle line. The first city hall, a structure about six feet square, cost $1,200. In front of it was the jail, a wooden shack, 14 feet X 30 feet, which contained as many as eighty prisoners at one time. Chains were used to shackle the unruly inmates.