• During 1881 & 1882, railroad tracks were laid down and a railroad station was built. The community was then named Holbrook after the first engineer of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad
  Atlantic and Pacific Railroad
  The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad was a U.S. railroad that owned or operated two disjoint segments, one connecting St. Louis, Missouri with Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the other connecting Albuquerque, New Mexico with Southern California. It was incorporated by the U.S. Congress in 1866 as a...
  
  . This station was replaced by the Santa Fe Depot
  Holbrook, Arizona (Train station)
  Holbrook was a train station in Holbrook, Arizona, United States, formerly served by the trains of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway prior to the creation of Amtrak in 1971.- History :...
  
   in 1892.

• Holbrook became the county seat of Navajo County in 1895 and was incorporated in 1917.

• Many of the events that played out during the Pleasant Valley War
  Pleasant Valley War
  The Pleasant Valley War, sometimes called the Tonto Basin Feud, or Tonto Basin War, was commonly thought to be an Arizona range war between two feuding families, the cattle-herding Grahams and the sheep-herding Tewksburys...
  
   up to 1887 occurred in and around Holbrook.

After the appearance of a smoke trail in the sky on July 19, 1912, a meteorite with an estimated mass of 190 kilograms exploded over the town of Holbrook, and a shower of stones fell from the sky, estimated to number more than 16,000 and varying in weight from 6.6 kilograms to less than 0.1 grams.
As of the census

Census

A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...

of 2000, there were 4,917 people, 1,626 households, and 1,195 families residing in the city.