Collin County’s transformation from rural farmland to
bustling urban hotspot may seem like a whirlwind affair when you look at the
last 20 years. But the region’s roots have a rich, storied past with
pioneer hardships – and even a little Old West gunplay -- that
hasn’t been completely buried with new development.
Both Collin County and its county seat, McKinney, are named
after one of the first settlers here: Collin McKinney (1766-1861). A land surveyor, merchant,
politician and lay preacher at various times in his life, McKinney was born in
New Jersey and had lived in Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas before he moved to
northeast Texas in 1830-31 while it was part of a colonization grant from
Mexico to an English empresario.
When the
Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos approved the Texas Declaration of Independence, McKinney was six weeks
shy of his 71st birthday. Being the oldest delegate to the convention, and one
of five men asked to help draft the declaration, he received the pen used to
sign the document by the 58 other delegates on March 2, 1836.
Four days later, The Alamo fell to Santa Anna’s army after a 13-day
siege with all of its defenders killed in the final assault. The battle became
a rallying cry that spurred Texans to defeat Mexican forces at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836.
In 1840, he moved with family members to a part of Fannin County that grew
out of the so-called Peters Colony, and was eventually subdivided into a
separate county (as was Grayson County) and named in his honor on April 3, 1846. The county’s population at the time totaled about 150, a scattered
posting of family-run farms that raised wheat and corn. The town of McKinney – 32 miles northwest of Dallas -- was made
the county seat in 1848 and also named after the statesman, though the 120-acre
town site wasn’t donated and platted out for another year.
Local historians point to isolated instances of violence
between early white settlers and Native American tribes in the 1840’s,
mostly attributed to roaming tribes – not the Caddos who lived in the
region. In Plano, two separate attacks were chronicled in 1842 and 1843. By the 1850’s, however, most Caddos
moved away from white settlements to the Brazos River area.
Collin County residents voted against secession from the Union
in 1861 by more than a 2-to-1 margin, but once Texas joined the Confederacy,
some 1,500 enlisted to fight for the South.
Reconstruction in Collin County belied some violence in the
form of the Lee-Peacock Feud, which ebbed and flowed from 1867 to 1871
in the common corners of Fannin, Grayson, Collin, and Hunt counties. Bob Lee, a
former Confederate officer, aroused the enmity of Lewis Peacock, a supporter of
the Union authorities. There was k
illing on both sides. Lee was waylaid and killed in 1869, and a systematic hunt
for his friends and supporters brought more bloodshed. When Peacock was shot on
June 13, 1871, the feud ended.
Like most Texas counties,
the arrival of the railroad led to the first major growth spurt for Collin
County. In 1872, when the first tracks connected McKinney and Plano to Houston,
about 900 small farms were scattered over a 851-square-mile area. In 1880,
outlaw Sam Bass purportedly committed one of the first train
robberies in the state at Allen.
By 1920, rail lines
criss-crossed the county, and more than 6,000 farms harvested millions of
bushels of corn and wheat – and about 49,000 bales of cotton -- out of
the dark clayey soil of the Blackland Prairie.
The 1920’s also brought more roads and easy access to
Dallas and Fort Worth via State Highway 289, which roughly paralleled Old Preston Road, a cattle path also known as the Shawnee
Trail that had been a well-traveled route for native tribes, cattlemen and
settlers. The county population topped 49,000 and McKinney grew to 6,600. The
Great Depression marked a decline in farms and population for the next 40
years. From 1930 to 1940, the numbers of farms dropped to 4,771. Unemployment
here stood at 19 percent.
Flood control and advances in
mechanization in the following decades kept farming alive though the numbers of
farms continued to shrink: 3,166 in 1950; 2,001 in 1960 – with a
corresponding drop in population.
By 1980, though dairy
farming had remained an important part of the county’s economy, light
industry and Dallas’ expansion northward triggered a new period of growth
that has yet to slow down. Plano saw the first mercurial growth spurts, but
Allen, Frisco and McKinney have undergone phenomenal growth of their own, while
former sleepy small towns like Prosper, Celina, Anna, Melissa, Fairview, Lucas
and Murphy grew by 16 to 28 percent between 2005-2006 alone.
| Census | Allen | Frisco | McKinney | Plano | Collin County |
| 1960 | 659 | 1,184 | 13,763 | 3,695 | 41,247 |
| 1970 | 1,940 | 1,845 | 15,193 | 17,872 | 66,920 |
| 1980 | 8,314 | 3,499 | 16,256 | 72,331 | 144,576 |
| 1990 | 18,309 | 6,141 | 21,283 | 128,713 | 264,036 |
| 2000 | 43,554 | 33,714 | 54,369 | 222,030 | 491,675 |
| 2005* | 66,900 | 74,150 | 93,750 | 248,700 | 653,000 |
| 2006* | 70,750 | 84,600 | 103,800 | 252,950 | 690,500 |
| 2007* | 76,600 | 92,100 | 112,000 | 255,700 | 724,900 |