Borger ( BOR-gər) is the largest city in Hutchinson County, Texas, United States. The population was 12,551 at the 2020 census. Borger is named for businessman Asa Philip “Ace” Borger, who also established the Hutchinson County seat of Stinnett and several other little towns in Texas and Oklahoma.

Ace Borger and his business accomplice John R. Miller purchased a 240-acre (0.97 km) townsite close the Canadian River in March 1926 after the discovery of oil in the vicinity. Within a few months, the boomtown had swollen to a population of 45,000, most lured by sensational advertising and “black gold”. In October 1926, the city charter was adopted, and Miller was elected mayor. By this time, the Panhandle & Santa Fe Railway had completed the spur origin to Borger, a publish office had opened, and a literary district was established. The boomtown of Borger soon had steam-generated electricity, telephone service, a hotel, and a jail. Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton depicted this times of Borger in his large painting Boomtown.

In the months that followed, oilmen, roughnecks, prospectors, panhandlers, and fortune seekers were joined by cardsharks, prostitutes, bootleggers, and drug dealers. The city became known as “Booger Town”, as it attracted criminals and fugitives from the law. The town management soon fell below control of an organized crime syndicate led by Mayor Miller’s shady associate, “Two-Gun Dick” Herwig. Dixon Street (now Tenth Street) was the “red-light” district, housing brothels, dance halls, speakeasies, and gambling dens. Murder and robbery became an dull occurrence, and illegal moonshining and house brewing flourished below the fatherly watch of Herwig and his henchmen, including W. J. (Shine) Popejoy, the king of the Texas bootleggers. Borger became as a result notorious that in the spring of 1927, Texas Governor Dan temperamental sent a force of Texas Rangers to rein in the town. The Texas Rangers were led by Captains Frank Hamer and Thomas R. Hickman. (Hamer would go on to unconventional fame and even infamy as the man who killed Bonnie and Clyde.)

The Rangers did have a stabilizing effect, but Borger nevertheless struggled following lawlessness and mistreatment into the 1930s, climaxing similar to the murder of District Attorney John A. Holmes by an assassin upon September 18, 1929. This situation caused Governor Moody to impose martial statute for a month and send in confess troops to back rid the town of its criminal element. Eventually, Borger established down, but not back town founder Ace Borger was shot and killed at the say office by Arthur Huey on August 31, 1934. Huey was county treasurer and was irked at Ace Borger for not bailing him out of jail upon an embezzlement charge. Huey shot Borger five times subsequent to a Colt .45 pistol, even pulling Borger’s own pistol out of his clothing and shooting him again, along taking into consideration others there in the say office.