It is situated in the historic barony of Dungannon Lower and the civil parish of Carnteel. In the 2001 Census it had a population of 801. Much of the town was built in the 18th Century by Acheson Moore, the local landlord. Because he backed the Jacobite cause, he planted his estate in the shape of a thistle and planned out the town on the edge of it. Unable to rename it "Mooretown", he had to settle for naming the main street "Moore Street", and the side streets Sydney, Lettice, and Henrietta (now Ravella Road), after his three wives. Aughnacloy served as an important staging post on the road to Derry. However, lacking large-scale industry, it started to wane in the late 19th century. On 20 January 1974, Cormac McCabe (42), the first Headmaster of Aughnacloy Secondary School and a Captain in the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), was shot dead by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). His corpse was found in a field near Aughnacloy. On 6 July 1977, David Morrow (37) a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer, was killed by the IRA while sitting in a stationary RUC patrol car in Aughnacloy. In 1988, Aidan McAnespie, a Catholic civilian, was killed, in contested circumstances, by a bullet from a general purpose machine-gun held by a British Army soldier at Aughnacloy. In June 2008, the Police Service of Northern Ireland Historical Enquiries Team published its findings on the case in a report. In the fatal shooting the soldier claimed that his hands were wet, causing him to accidentally fire the machine-gun. The report called this the "least likely version" of what happened. Aughnacloy had its own railway station on the Clogher Valley Railway (CVR) from 2 May 1887 to 1 January 1942. The CVR's headquarters and locomotive workshop was also at Aughnacloy. Current proposals to upgrade the A5 road through the village to a dual carriageway and build a bypass have met with a mixed reaction in the town, with many traders and farmers strongly opposed. Aughnacloy is classified as a Small Village or Hamlet by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA)] (i.e. with population between 500 and 1,000 people).