LAND

    In 1928 a fossil of a small prehistoric fish was found at Rowlett Cemetery in what is today’s Collin County.  Two years later, a giant fossil fish was found 4.6 miles east of Celina.  The fossil measured a whopping twelve feet, ten inches long, and was estimated to be 65 million years old.  That same year, another fish, this one only eighteen inches long, was also discovered near Celina.  In 1948 yet another prehistoric fish was unearthed during construction of the Lavon Reservoir.  Besides these major findings, likely thousands of other fossils of various shells, especially prehistoric oysters; fish scales and teeth; and worms have been, and are continuing to be, found.  Of course, all of this simply confirms what is already known about Texas, namely that it has gone through repeated periods of flooding both by small seas and large oceans, often for millions of years at a time.

    The most active geologic activity of Texas’ earliest prehistory occurred generally in the western and central parts of the state.  The land rose and fell in succession, forming seas and mountains, plains, and rivers.  During the early Mesozoic Era (late Triassic Epoch), about 220 million years ago, the focus of major geologic events in Texas shifted to the eastern and southeastern parts of the state.  Huge continental plates – called the European and African-South American continental plates – had collided earlier with the North American plate to form features like the Ouachita Mountains of today’s Oklahoma.  But during the Mesozoic Era, these plates began to separate again, and thus began the initial stage of what geologists now call the Gulfian cycle, so named because it was during this time that the Gulf of Mexico was formed.  It was during this period too that large salt domes were formed, and huge deposits of oil and natural gas were trapped in the shale and sandstone, deposits that would someday shape Texas’ future.

    By the Early Cretaceous period, shallow seas yet again extended inland, submerging much of the state, this time as far west as the Trans-Pecos region and north almost to the state line.  During most of the Late Cretaceous, Texas continued to lay beneath marine waters, but by this time they were even deeper than the Early Cretaceous seas.  As a result of these repeated floods, followed by heaving and receding water, over millions of years much of Texas became covered by often very thick layers of limestone which was formed from the bones of ancient sea creatures like the Celina fossils.

    Today’s Collin County occupies portions of three large geologic formations, all of which were created during the Cretaceous periods.  These include the Eagle Ford that extends from the Texas panhandle into the western part of the county, the Taylor Marl which enters the county from the east, and a ten to twelve mile wide finger-like extension of the Austin Chalk that runs generally through the middle of the county.  Because Fairview is located very near the geographic center of Collin County, Texas, it is this Austin Chalk upon which the community sits.  The entire Austin Chalk formation begins near Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande and spreads all the way northeastward to the Texarkana area.  This “whiterock” was created from the deep water deposits of the Late Cretaceous period, and in places reaches depths of up to 1,500 feet.

    With the exception of a small portion of its western edge, Collin County's 851 square miles lie entirely within the Blackland Prairie region of Texas, a subdivision of the Great Southern Plains.  The Blacklands consist of about 12.6 million acres of moderately steep to gently rolling terrain surfaced generally by black clay over thick limestone.  The surface of the county is generally level to gently rolling, with an elevation ranging from 450 to 700 feet above sea level.  Deep clayey soils over the underlying marl and chalk surface the central and western part of the county.  Dark loamy alluvial soils, subject to flooding during the rainy season, lie in the eastern section.  The major clay type is called Houston black clay, which covers about 46.8% of the county.  Other major surface clays include Houston clay, Sumpter clay, Bell clay, and Trinity clay.

    Before European settlement, Texas uplands were dominated by little bluestem, big bluestem, Indian grass, buffalo grass, and tall dropseed.  The lowlands of the northeast were dominated by eastern grama grass and switch grass.  The western and central portions of Collin County, drained by the East Fork of the Trinity River, were covered by expansive, virtually open grasslands, with a very few areas of scattered trees and shrubs along creeks and the river.  The eastern section of the county, drained by the Elm Fork of the Trinity, was marked by more varied terrain, including hills and valleys, and riparian areas were covered by hardwood forests dominated by sumac, post oak, bois d’arc (or orange osage), sugarberry, elm, mesquite, cottonwood, hackberry, pecan, ash, and live oaks.  Some areas, including today’s Fairview, were also marked by cedars and junipers.

    Collin County temperatures range from an average high of 96° F in July to an average low of 34° in January.  Rainfall averages just under thirty-five inches a year, and the growing season extends for 237 days.

INDIANS

    Human exploration of the future Texas began during the Pleistocene period, when it is believed that lower sea levels exposed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, and early humans migrated from Asia into what is now North America.  Another, less accepted, theory of pre-Columbian exploration suggests that pre-historic mariners from China, Africa, and/or the Mediterranean may have reached the New World by following favorable ocean currents.

    The presence of bone and stone evidence points to human exploration and colonizing activity in Texas sometime after 11,500 B.C.  The first known explorers of Texas were the Clovis people of the Paleo-Indian Stage.  Clovis stone projectile points have been found in playas and ancient springs in far north Texas, and in rock shelters and stratigraphic layers in South and Central Texas such as Aquarena Springs near San Marcos.  These points suggest early Americans were not only gatherers, but also very good hunters, who lived an incredibly difficult and dangerous existence.  Though never numerous, the Clovis people of Texas explored vigorously from a network of base camps, overlooks, kill sites, quarries, and hunting camps.

    These first humans to live in the area today known as Collin County were of course, the ancestors of later Native Americans.  Very ancient artifacts have been found in a few sites near Lake Lavon and in neighboring Denton County dating back many thousands of years.  In the first years after white settlement began in the early nineteenth century, stone arrow points said to have been of prehistoric peoples were picked up along Wilson Creek in or near eastern Fairview.  Other sites, now under Lake Lavon, were dated to A.D. 1020 using radio-carbon dating.  In 1926 a skeleton of an early Indian, buried apparently standing up, was discovered about a mile from Walnut Grove.  In 1933 another human skeleton, surrounded by many stone arrowheads, was found near Westminster.  In 1950 a methodical approach to examining the county’s archaeology was undertaken when a number of sites were identified for digs.  Only two of the planned digs ever took place, but these two – the Campbell Hole Site and the Hogge Bridge Site – resulted in the discovery of many important artifacts.  Interestingly, everything that was found was from a time prior to European contact, and therefore was dated to a probable time somewhere between 1300 and 1600.  Archaeological surveys in 1996 and 1998 discovered a prehistoric site associated with a spring southwest of McKinney.  Another site, which consisted of a bell-shaped cistern, was discovered in 2002.  In 1999 AR Consultants discovered two buried sites while conducting an archaeological survey for Fairview Park.  Site 41COL115 is a buried Late Prehistoric site in the south bank of Sloan Creek, with arrow points, lithic tools, and debris, fire-cracked rock, mussel shell and bone present.  Site 41COL116 is in the bank of a minor tributary to Sloan Creek and also contains fire-cracked rock and lithic debris.  Unfortunately the site could not be dated.  Taken together, the results of these various surveys suggest that except for a few areas adjacent to permanent sources of water, peoples living in this area were likely nomads who came and went quickly in their searches for buffalo or antelope.

Of course the earliest specifically identified peoples were various Indian, or Native American, tribes, including the Caddoes and Tonkawas, as well as a few smaller tribes that were, over time, absorbed by others.  The Tonkawas lived for many years along the Red and Trinity Rivers, and have been referred to by some historians as the only permanent or original inhabitants of Collin County.  Like their allies the Lipan Apache, the Tonkawas were semi-nomadic hunters who lived in tepees and followed the game upon which they depended for their food.  One known Tonkawa village was located about seven miles northwest, and a second about three miles north, of McKinney.  The most memorable thing about the Tonkawas was their reputation as cannibals, who, according to eyewitnesses, occasionally ate the flesh of conquered enemies.  It was believed that by eating an especially brave enemy, some of that courage would be passed along to the “diner.”

The Caddoes were a much larger, more expansive tribe, occupying large parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and East and North Texas for centuries.  In fact, numerous archaeological finds have dated the Caddoes to at least as far back as the 800s, where they tended to live along the area’s many creeks and rivers.  This practice would later be mimicked by white settlers, and helped ensure good supplies of both drinking water and the game that came to the water to drink.

From the earliest times, the Caddoes, like other tribes of southeastern North America, were farmers, growing corn, beans, pumpkins and squash, as well as such native plants as maygrass, amaranth, chenopods, and sunflowers.  Many of these plants were grown in common mounds of earth, so that later observers would describe bean stalks wound around corn stalks, with squash growing along the growth underneath.  Another Caddo trait was training pumpkin vines to climb trees, so that the fruit would hang from lower limbs.  Trees themselves were cleared by slashing their trunks and allowing them to die, and then rot or be burned.

By the 1300s most Caddoes were consuming large amounts of maize, which remained the tribe’s most important food source until their eventual removal to reservations in the 1840s and 1850s.  Several varieties of corn were cultivated, including an early or “little corn,” harvested around July, and the “flour corn” that was harvested in early autumn during a festival time known as the Harvest of the Great Corn.  “Flour,” or corn meal, was made by pounding dried corn in hollow tree trunks, and then winnowing out the large pieces until only a powder remained.  Deer was the most important source of meat, but the Caddoes also enjoyed bison and bear.  Small game included wild hogs, prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and turkeys, as well as fish.  Wild fruit and nuts were also gathered.

Like most farming people, in time the Caddoes settled in villages and towns, at first building their houses out of grass and cane poles, but later building more permanent structures as their villages and their religion became better established and more important to their lives.    One of the major features of this civilization was the construction of large earthen mounds.  The mounds had a number of uses, including as temple platforms for civic and religious functions, for burials of socially and politically prominent tribesmen, and for ceremonial fire mounds.  Burial traditions included placing the dead body with its head to the west, and burying the dead Egyptian-like accompanied by their worldly possessions and even food.  It was believed that after death the spirit would stay close to the grave mound for a few days as it gained strength for its final journey, and then it would move on, with its possessions in tow, to the world of the dead. The largest communities and the most important ceremonial mounds were primarily located along the Red, Arkansas, Little, Ouachita, and Sabine Rivers.

The Caddoes also maintained amazingly long-distance trade networks that dated back to prehistoric times. Trade items included bison hides, salt, and bois d’arc wood (which was prized for the making of bows).  In exchange, the Caddoes received copper, stone, turquoise, and marine shells used for gorgets, pendants, beads, cups, and dippers, plus finished objects such as pottery vessels and large ceremonial utensils.  Some of these trade items came from as far away as New Mexico, the Gulf Coast, and even the Great Lakes.  The value placed on these trade goods is signified by the fact that so many burial mounds contained these items.  In other words, these were such valued possessions that men and women wanted to be sure and take them with them into the afterlife.

The Caddoes are particularly well known for the beauty and artistry of their pottery.  This pottery, much of which has been recovered from burial mounds and middens, include wares they manufactured for cooking and the storage of foodstuffs, as well as for use in religious ceremonies.  Stone was fashioned into arrowheads, and the Caddoes also made ground stone celts and axes for use in removing trees and turning over the soil. They made bone into awls, beamers, digging implements, and hoes, as well as ornaments, beads, and whistles.  Hoes and digging tools were also sometimes made of freshwater mussel shells.

One of the more unique traditions of the Caddoes was the fact that they traced lineage through the maternal side of a family, unlike most other tribes and Europeans.  Clans, which were ranked, were also very important to the Caddo culture, and marriages most commonly took place between members of different clans.  Religious and political authority was generally held by a hierarchy of men within each clan. The xinesi provided spiritual leadership, the caddi served as headmen or “chiefs” of their clans, and the canahas were something akin to village elders.

In 1542, the Spanish first found this wide area of Caddo occupation when the Hernando De Soto expedition crossed Texas and Louisiana.  De Soto was dead by the time his men entered the Caddo lands, but his successor, Luis de Moscoso, and others left written descriptions of the peoples they saw.  They particularly noted the many scattered settlements in which they lived, and their abundant food reserves of corn.  They were also taken aback by the Caddoes’ physical appearance.  It was common practice for the Indians to tightly bind the heads of infants so as to deform their skulls, making the heads of adult Caddoes incredibly long and narrow.  Significant tattooing and nose and ear piercings were also common.  Tattoos were applied by rubbing charcoal into cuts and gashes on the face, often in very elaborate patterns.  But the tribe greeted visitors in an even odder way – by weeping, moaning, and crying out as if in deep mourning.

More than a century after the Spanish first experienced these odd machinations, in 1687 the French, led by the hapless Sieur de La Salle, found and visited the Caddoes too.  The name Caddo is actually a French abbreviation of Kadohadacho, a word meaning something like “real chief” or “real Caddo” in the native dialect.  Europeans generally divided the Caddoes into three major groups:  Hasinai, Kadohadacho, and Natchitoches.  The Hasinai lived in the Neches and Angelina River valleys in East Texas, the Kadohadacho near the Big Bend of the Red River, and the Natchitoches on the Red in Louisiana.  It was near one Caddo village that the French built Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux Natchitos (St. John the Baptist of the Natchitoches), which over time became Natchitoches, Louisiana.  Similarly, France’s nemesis, Spain, built the town of Nacogdoches, Texas at the site of a Hasinai Caddo town.

The Caddoes lived cooperatively and peacefully for many years with the French, in time adding the raising of livestock to their food sources.  This change made them less mobile – even though many Caddoes also became horsemen for the first time – since chasing after game was no longer necessary to acquire meat.  Even so, the introduction of the horse did lead many Caddo men to participate in annual winter bison hunts out on the western prairies.  Most people today are surprised to learn that bison – American buffalo – lived in the woods of Louisiana and East Texas through the early 1800s.  As these forest buffalo were exterminated in East and North Texas by white hunters in the early nineteenth century, mounted Caddoes traveled many miles in search of the large animals for their meat, hides, and bones.

The Caddoes and other Indian tribes like the Delaware also learned that a living could be made trading with the Spanish and French, and Natchitoches and Nacogdoches both became important fur, horse, and gun trading centers.  The natives soon grew to enjoy and depend on European trade goods.  Like Native Americans everywhere, of course, Texas Indians were unusually susceptible to European diseases, to which they had virtually no resistance.  Plagues in 1691 and again in 1816 nearly destroyed some tribes, and devastated the Caddo.

Over time, various other tribes also migrated into the Collin County area, most notably the Cherokees, Delawares, and Kickapoos.  The Delawares originated from the areas along the Delaware River in New Jersey, and were the first Indian tribe to sign a treaty with the United States, even while the American Revolution still raged in 1778. They subsequently moved to Indiana and Ohio, and moved into what was then Spanish Missouri in 1789.  Coincidentally, Moses Austin and his son Stephen, who would late become known as the “Father of Texas” also lived for a time in Spanish Missouri.  The Delawares moved again in 1812 to present-day Oklahoma.  Beginning around 1820, some moved farther south, crossing the Red River into Texas.  At least one Delaware village was located on the eastern end of present-day Fairview, situated along Wilson Creek near where the Fitzhugh Mill would later be built (near County Roads 323 and 317).

The Kickapoos had a similar trek across America, moving west and south as the United States expanded.  They were originally a Canadian and later Midwestern tribe, living for a time in Illinois.  They found themselves in Missouri by 1819, moved west into Kansas by about 1835, and soon thereafter headed south again, building their traditional bark-covered houses in Oklahoma and North Texas, including Collin County, before finally migrating all the way to Mexico.

    Perhaps the best known of all the Indian tribes to live in Collin County were the once mighty Cherokees.  They built an unusually advanced civilization in Georgia in the 1700s and early 1800s, with a written language, their own newspaper, and an advanced government.  They were excellent farmers and many lived in log cabins and even early brick homes.  Some observers agreed that they were more civilized than their white neighbors.  Unfortunately for them, their farmlands were the best to be had, and as the white population expanded, more and more whites demanded that these lands be handed over.  Wars with the Creeks and the Seminoles only encouraged whites’ desires to be rid of the Cherokees.  In 1838-39, they got their way when the Cherokees were rounded up and ordered to relocate to Indian Territory.  The Cherokees sued to keep their land and actually won in the United States Supreme Court, but the justices’ decision was conveniently ignored.  A few Cherokees hid in the mountains of North Carolina and are still there today, but most left, hundreds dying along their “Trail of Tears.”  In what was to become Oklahoma, the Cherokees fared well enough over time, but in an act of resistance, a few bands settled in Arkansas and North and East Texas instead of Oklahoma. 

Here they dreamed of making Texas a new Cherokee homeland.  They tried desperately to get along with their neighbors and to be loyal to their new governments.  When Benjamin Edwards planned his abortive Fredonian Rebellion against Spain in 1826-27, the Cherokee even arrested, tried, and executed two of their own chiefs who had agreed to help Edwards.  Their loyalties to, in turn, the Spanish, Mexicans, and Texans were never fully appreciated, however.  Treaties were not honored by the whites, and Cherokee requests for land titles were turned down.  They were ultimately driven from Texas in 1839.  One Cherokee village in Collin County may have survived at least for a few years after the expulsion.  This village, peculiarly enough called “Squeezepenny” for unknown reasons, was probably located along Indian Creek north or northwest of present-day Farmersville.

    Indians of at least one of the Collin County tribes lived on or near Wilson Creek on what would later become the Powell property, annexed into the Town of Fairview in 1999.  John Powell would later recall finding large numbers of arrowheads at a rock outcropping near the intersection of Old Mill Road and CR 317.  All of the tribes that lived in the area over the years hunted with bows and arrows, so just which one lived in this part of northern Fairview is uncertain, but likely they were Caddoes or Delawares.  It would seem almost a certainty too that Indians made their homes along Sloan Creek, again because of its steady supply of water and the game that could be caught along its banks.  In addition to the tribes who called Collin County home, at least two others, the Shawnees and the dreaded Comanches, also traveled through the area at times, both while hunting and while at war.

AMERICANS

When the United States completed its purchase of Louisiana in 1803, many of the Louisiana Caddo, or Natchitoches, band relocated across the Sabine and Red Rivers into Spanish territory.  They preferred the French to the Spanish, but now that their friends the French were gone, they clearly favored the Spanish over the land-hungry Americans.  That was fine with the Spanish, who also feared American expansion and thus decided to use Indian tribes as a buffer against their new neighbors.  So the Spanish not only welcomed the additional Caddoes but also invited Choctaw, Alabama, Cherokee, and Coushatta Indians into East Texas in an effort to impede potential American traders and colonists.

When Napoleon had first taken over Louisiana from Spain, he agreed to hold it only for safe-keeping and to never allow any English-speaking countries (i.e. the United States or Great Britain) to get it.  Of course in 1803 he was at war with the British and needed money, so for 15 million American dollars he broke that pledge.  This enormous land sale caused trouble almost immediately.  Many of the more than 100,000 Americans then living in the Mississippi River valley began slipping over their new border with Spain to take wild horses, to trap and hunt, and even to grab land in Texas.  And the border itself was also a problem.  Much of North Texas was a disputed no-man’s land, including what would become Collin County.  Spain said the boundary was the Red River; the United States argued that it was below the Sabine.  If correct, the Americans’ claim would have made the future Collin County part of the U.S. thirty-three years sooner.  A final boundary was not agreed to until 1819, and war was only narrowly averted on at least one occasion.  Under the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, the U.S. gave up its claim to North Texas, and Spain gave up its old claims to parts of Florida.

Despite their fears of the Americans, however, a new Spanish government agreed in 1821 to allow Moses Austin to bring 300 Anglo families into Texas, in this case to help serve as a buffer between Mexico and warlike Plains Indians.  Austin had a good reputation with the Spanish, having lived as a loyal Spanish citizen for many years in Missouri, where he made and then lost a small fortune in the lead mining business.  Before Austin could begin what he thought would be his life’s work, however, he developed pneumonia and died in Missouri on June 10, 1821.

In compliance with his father’s dieing wish, twenty-seven year-old Stephen F. Austin headed to San Antonio to finalize Moses’ colonization contract.  Negotiations went well, and the Spanish agreed to give a full section of land, 640 acres, to each head of household Austin could bring in.  An additional 320 acres would be given for a wife, 160 acres more for each child, and another 80 acres for each slave.  Men who agreed to build and operate ferries and mills would be given even more land.  All they had to pay was a surveying and registration fee to Austin of $0.12½ per acre.  Recruiting of the families began well enough, but almost immediately trouble began when war broke out in 1821.  Not between Spain and the United States, though, like so many had feared.  This was Mexico’s war for independence.

Ever the salesman like his father, a year later Austin was able to convince the new Mexican government that his plan was still a good one.  He was told his agreement with Spain to bring in Anglo colonists would be honored by Mexico, and the conditions would remain largely the same.  Settlers would have to renounce their American citizenship and convert to Catholicism.  Land would still be free.  Farmers would get a labor, or 177 acres.  Ranchers would get a sitio, or 4,428 acres.  Austin, who would himself get 100,000 acres, happily consented.  His colony did well, and soon there were other Texas colonies, including not only those who welcomed Anglo settlers, but also new ones reserved for Irish and German colonists, plus some who encouraged Mexican immigration.  And Austin would later be given three more colonies to fill up too.  In all, twenty-five men were awarded colonization contracts, including John Cameron, whose assigned area included North Texas between the Red and Sabine Rivers.  Like most of the colonizers, Cameron never really got started.  In fact, no whites settled in the area that would become Collin County until after Texas had gotten its independence from Mexico.

The population of Texas in 1821 amounted to about 3,500 white settlers versus 20,000 Indians.  The eastern tribes were considered more “civilized” and were generally much more peaceful, so the new national government of Mexico, along with the state government of Coahuila y Tejas, believed that the twin strategies of cooperating with the eastern Indians and bringing in more whites, would hold back the wild western tribes like the Apaches and the much-feared Comanches, who Mexico dared not fight openly.

So the burden of defending the frontier against these hostile Indians fell on Austin and the other colonizers, sometimes called empresarios.  Mexico would offer no assistance.  Toward this end the settlers organized militia and made treaties whenever possible.  In 1823 Austin led an expedition against the Karankawas, called “Kronks” by the whites, and reached an agreement with them by which they would not move east of the San Antonio and Guadalupe rivers.  In 1824 military threats by whites led to a treaty with the Tonkawas, Karankawas, Wacos, and Tawakonis, which lessened the immediate danger from those groups.  On Christmas Eve 1824, the Shawnees signed another new treaty that awarded them one square mile of land for each warrior.  It was thought to be a small price to pay for peace.

By 1830, relations between the colonists and the Mexican government had soured.  The United Sates twice offered to buy parts of Texas.  Both offers were turned down, but as a result many Mexican government officials grew suspicious and wondered if it was the United States’ plan to take Texas away from them by force if necessary.  Troubles with colonists like Haden Edwards in Nacogdoches, along with resistance to government authority by hotheads in Brazoria and Anahuac, further troubled the government.  On the colonists’ side, they were shocked when new immigration from the U.S. was abruptly cancelled.  That meant friends and family back in the States would not be able to join them.  The freeing of slaves throughout Mexico also angered some colonists.  Not that many Texans owned slaves, but the outlawing of slavery still struck them as yet another slap at the colonists, who believed they had as a whole done everything asked of them.  When the Mexican government announced that they would offer up to eleven times more land to Mexican immigrants than they had to the Anglos, and that convicts would also be sent to help populate Texas instead of American colonists, even men like Stephen F. Austin were angered and insulted.

The colonists called a number of conventions and consultations over the years to discuss what they should do, and Austin himself was sent to Mexico City to seek a peaceful solution to the growing tensions.  But once there, Austin, the most loyal of colonists, was imprisoned.  The last hope for peace had died.  In time, open conflict between Texas and Mexico seemed inevitable.

REPUBLIC

On October 2, 1835 a troop of about 180 Mexican soldiers was sent to Gonzalez to seize a small cannon that had originally been placed there for protection against the Indians.  No doubt with their ancestors from Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts in mind, the Texans refused to turn the cannon over.  They even pieced together a flag that invited the Mexicans to “Come and Take It.”  After a great deal of fruitless talk, the Texans attacked the soldiers and drove them away.  In December, after much bloody house-to-house fighting, Texans also seized the town of San Antonio de Bexar, and an old mission there named San Antonio de Valero.  Among those who fought there was George Washington Smith, a North Texan who would later migrate to the area that would become Collin County.  The Texan Revolution had begun.

On March 2, 1836 in a cramped, airless wooden blacksmith shop in a tiny village called, appropriately enough, Washington-on-the-Brazos, a group of forty of the leading citizens of Texas bravely approved a declaration of independence from Mexico.  Not far away, fighting raged as the siege of San Antonio de Valero mission, also called the Alamo, neared its tragic end.  The Washington convention named Sam Houston, who also celebrated his birthday on March 2, commander-in-chief of the largely non-existent Texan army two days later.  A constitution was approved on March 16; a temporary government headed by interim president David G. Burnett was approved on March 17.  The next day the meeting was adjourned and everyone headed out of town, lest they be captured by Mexican cavalry.  The Alamo had fallen on March 6, with no prisoners taken.

What became known as the “Runaway Scrape” followed.  The Texans panicked and fled north and northeast as fast as they could go, taking what they could with them, and burning much of what was left behind.  When news of the slaughter of the nearly 200 men at the Alamo, and 400 more at Goliad on March 27, reached the refugees, their frenzy only grew worse.  Many thought Houston would never fight, and some of his own men and officers accused him of cowardice.  Others thought he was trying to lead his men to the United States border where he hoped to bring the U.S. Army into the fight.  President Andrew Jackson was a close personal friend and political ally of Houston, who was a former Tennessee governor, and it was thought by some that the two had perhaps prearranged American help in advance.  When Jackson sent troops to Louisiana to monitor the revolution across the border, it seemed to confirm people’s suspicions.

Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, in pursuit of Houston, became careless and over-confident.  He believed the war was essentially already over, the rebellion crushed.  He divided his army and allowed his men to grow lax in their scouting of Houston’s men.  Along Buffalo Bayou on April 21, Houston stopped, turned, and in a surprise attack completely destroyed Santa Anna’s larger army.  Again among the Texan soldiers was George Washington Smith.  Houston was painfully wounded in the ankle, and the Texans suffered another thirty-three wounded and nine killed.  But Santa Anna lost over 600 killed and almost that many more captured.  The Mexican president-general himself was captured the following morning dressed as a private.  He was forced to sign the Treaty of Hidalgo, granting Texas its full independence and ordering all Mexican armies south of the Rio Grande.

    Mexico never did recognize Texas independence, but the United States did, as did France and the United Kingdom.  Santa Anna was sent off to a brief exile in New York City (where he helped invent chewing gum), but in time returned to Mexico and again became president.  Mexican armies raided Texas, and Texan armies raided Mexico several times over the next few years, but the Republic of Texas was a reality.  Ties to Mexico were forever broken.  Sam Houston became the first of four Texas presidents, and the little nation even built its own navy.  With independence, all the restrictions on immigration and slavery disappeared.  Men and families rushed in from all over, but especially from the southern U.S.

    The new country’s land policy provided that all heads of household who lived in Texas before Independence Day, March 2, 1836, would get a league (4,428 acres) and a labor (177 acres) of land.  This totaled up to more than seven square miles of free land.  Single men would get one-third of a league.  Anyone who served in the army prior to August 1, 1836 could get the same thing.

    Among those many soldiers who received this land bounty were George W. Smith, Daniel Rowlett, William Thompson, Samuel Sloan, Hardin Wright, Richard H. Locke, and Calvin Boales.  Each of these men selected lands in what would become, a few years later, Collin County, but at that time was still a part of Fannin County.  This was still a rough area, and no whites lived here area until probably 1841.  One account in the Annals of Elder Horn described the many wild bears, wolves, and panthers.  “We are living on the bank of a steep ravine,” the account went, “where the prairie meets the woods ... The wolves are numerous, and often at night, when the weather is cold and the wolves are very hungry, they come to the door.  While mother is frying meat ... they snarl and snap gnaw on the corner of the kitchen [wall].”

    Of course, hungry wolves and wild animals were not the main reason few whites lived here yet.  This was still Indian territory into which only the very bravest of whites dared venture.  And those few hardy souls who did settle here stayed mainly at or very near the Throckmorton settlement on Throckmorton Creek, since its cabins were surrounded by a protective stockade.   From time to time, families ventured out to farm land outside the settlement but they were always driven back by Indian attacks, sometimes with terrible results.  No doubt for this reason, it appears that with the exceptions of Smith and Rowlett, none of the bounty men ever came up from central Texas to live here, apparently selling their Collin County land to other settlers instead.  Even so, county land records still bear their names, showing up in modern deeds and plats.  Rowlett is also the apparent namesake of Rowlett Creek.

    Daniel Rowlett was born around 1786, one of the nine children of William and Jemima (Owen) Rowlett, in Prince Edward County, Virginia.   Rowlett moved with his parents to what became Owen County, Kentucky, in the early 1790s and grew up near Gratz, thirty miles north of Frankfort.  He married Nancy Ellis on November 20, 1807, in Franklin County, Kentucky.  They had three daughters. After Nancy’s death around 1815, Rowlett returned to Prince Edward County, Virginia, to marry Martha Penick, on November 18, 1817. Their only child died in infancy.  By 1819, due to his reputation as an excellent land surveyor, the Kentucky legislature employed him to survey the future Calloway County.  After his second wife’s death, about 1820, Rowlett remained a widower until June 5, 1833, when he married for the third time, to Mary (Polly) Ann Jones in Calloway County, Kentucky.  They had four children, three of whom grew to maturity.

    He left Wadesboro, Kentucky in late 1835 and spent a short time in Tennessee before immigrating to Texas by way of the steamboat Rover out of Memphis.  Taking passage shortly after Christmas, Rowlett arrived at Jonesboro in what is now Red River County around the first of March.  He settled down initially along the Red River near the mouth of Pepper Camp Creek in the Tulip Bend area.  In 1838 this area was organized as Fannin County, named in honor of James Fannin, the ill-fated commander of the Texans slaughtered at Goliad in spring 1836 by order of Santa Anna.  At that time Fannin County was huge, encompassing several future counties south of the Red River, including Collin, Denton, Grayson, and others.

Early Map Showing Area Land Grants

Early on, Rowlett volunteered to serve in the local militia of his new home, and is credited with leading a five-man unit on a week-long visit to Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Caddo camps in the Sherman and Denison area in May 1836.  The Texan Revolution was over by then, but so soon after San Jacinto, many assumed a new Mexican invasion was still likely, and it was important that peace be kept with the Indian tribes.  Rowlett joined Captain John Hart’s Red River cavalry company on July 20 and marched south to join the main Texan army under Sam Houston then in Victoria.  Along the way, in Nacogdoches in August, Rowlett was appointed army quartermaster.  It soon becoming apparent the war was truly over, the army began to disband, and Rowlett was discharged at Columbia on October 24.

    For his military service Rowlett received a bounty warrant grant of 320 acres, which he located northeast of today’s McKinney.  For having arrived in Texas before March 2, he also got his league and a labor.  He took about half of his free land near his original Texas home on the Red River and the other half at the head of what would become known as Rowlett Creek, near the present-day intersection of Custer Road and SH 121.

    Rowlett represented two different Texas counties in the Republic’s legislature over three different terms between 1837 and 1844.  He served on the board of land commissioners in 1839 and again in 1840.  In 1838 he served as an attorney before the commissioners’ court sitting as a probate court, and briefly served as county attorney pro tem.  Rowlett also managed a large plantation, acted as postmaster at Lexington, and practiced medicine.  In 1841 he established a ferry across the Red River between Lexington and the Indian Territory.  He was a long-time member of the Masonic order and was also quite active in the Baptist Church.  Rowlett died on December 2, 1847, and was buried in the Inglish Cemetery, now at Bonham.

    Calvin Boales (also spelled Boles) was born in Christian County, Kentucky, around 1800, the son of James and Elizabeth (Bradshaw) Boales.  His father was a native of Ireland.  He married Frances Ann Tandy of Virginia on June 22, 1826, in the Bethel Baptist Church.  Not quite ten years later, in January 1835, Boales immigrated to Texas from Lawrence County, Mississippi.  In Texas he settled in Sterling C. Robertson’s colony, along with his wife and their oldest three children.  Four more children would be born in Texas.  They took their oaths of Mexican citizenship and officially “converted” to Catholicism at Robertson’s colony on December 27, 1835.  They settled on and farmed a labor of land on the Brazos River about 1.5 miles below Nashville, a tiny settlement in what later became Milam County.

    When war came, Boales served as fourth sergeant in Robertson's company of rangers, organized at Viesca and mustered into service on January 17, 1836.  On February 20, Boales and sixty-seven other settlers in Robertson’s colony signed a memorial addressed to the independence convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. The petition stated that the signers were determined to assist the Texas government in conducting the war to a successful conclusion by defending the country from both Indian depredation and Mexican attack.  They also recommended the establishment of a separate “Register’s Office,” with records in English, so that they could obtain legal titles to their land, and other settlers would be encouraged to come to Texas.  The convention certainly had more important things on their minds that February and March, but the recommendation did result in the establishment of the General Land Office of Texas the next December 22, after the war was over.

    During 1836 Robertson’s ranger company was headquartered at the falls of the Brazos River to protect their colony from possible Indian attacks.  Boales rose to the rank of captain, and served under Colonel Edward Burleson from July 1836 to January 1837.  His service made him eligible for a bounty land grant and he received 320 acres on the Little River in what is now Bell County, and an entire league in what later became Collin County.  That league is today known as the Calvin Boles Survey and, straddling Wilson Creek, includes almost all of the far eastern reaches of modern Fairview.  He served in a ranging company on the frontier of Milam County from March to June 1839 under Captain George B. Erath, and supported the Army of the Republic of Texas by providing food supplies to Colonel Wheeler’s troops on their march to the frontier in 1840.  Boales died in February 1853 in Austin.

    Much less is known about Samuel Sloan, but his original league today still bears his name.  The Samuel Sloan Survey includes the heart of modern Fairview, stretching from Stacy Road on the south to FM 1378 on the north and east.  In fact the very reason the old McKinney to Rockwall Road (including a ford over Sloan Creek) followed its circuitous route east and then south is that it followed Sloan’s north and east property lines.  The survey’s western boundary ends just shy of today’s SH 5.  Sloan Creek also bears his name.

    Giving land to settlers who had been around before March 2, 1836, and to men who had served in the military like Rowlett, Boales, and Sloan, certainly helped settle the new nation.  But only a little.  In 1836 the total non-Indian population of Texas was only about 30,000.  What was needed were completely new settlers from the United States, and even from foreign countries too.  Just like the Spanish and then Mexican governments had hoped to bring in colonists to populate Texas and shield them from the wild Indian tribes, the Texans soon adopted many of the same policies, beginning an empresario period of their own.  In addition to pushing the Indian frontier back to the west, it was hoped that new settlers would bring in much-needed money, especially American currency and specie.  Texas had lots of land, but was incredibly poor otherwise.  One way in which the Texas colonizer plan was different from its predecessors was that the republic kept one-half of the land within each colony for itself.  It was thought that in this way, once the empresarios and the colonists had settled and improved an area, the national government could sell the parcels it had kept for itself at a much higher price.  It was a good idea, but ended with mixed results.

    In very sparsely populated North Texas, the most notable empresario grant was the Peters Colony, founded by William S. Peters, an English musician and businessman who immigrated to the United States in 1827 and settled first in Blairsville and then later in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Some historians have suggested that Peters viewed the colony simply as a business venture from which he hoped to recoup easy profits, while others have suggested that he was much influenced by his studies of the philanthropic ideas of William Godwin and Thomas Paine.  If so, he may have seen the colony as an opportunity for members of the English industrial middle class to migrate to America and form their own egalitarian society.  A group of French utopians did something quite similar when they founded La Reunion on the Trinity River a year later.  That experiment failed, though its members did contribute their numbers to the future city of Dallas.

    The headquarters of the Peters colony was in Louisville, Kentucky, where Peters’ son William C. operated a successful music store.  From this music store W. S. Peters and Samuel Browning, one of three of Peters’ American sons-in-law who invested in the colony, departed in June 1839 to seek English support.  He would make several such trips to England and France on behalf of his colony.  He returned from this first trip to England in July 1841 with good news from his London investors.  In August 1841, in Austin, Browning signed the first of four colonization contracts with the Republic of Texas.  Ten or eleven of the initial investors were English; the remainder were Americans, including the three sons-in-law and three sons.

    The first contract established the boundaries of the colony as beginning on the Red River at the mouth of Big Mineral Creek, running south for sixty miles, then west for twenty-two miles, north again to the Red River and then east along the river to the point of origin.  This took in most of present-day Denton County and portions of Collin and other counties.  According to the terms of the contract the empresarios had to recruit 200 families from outside the republic in the first three years.  The colonists were to receive 320 acres per single man over seventeen years of age and up to 640 acres per family.  The empresarios were allowed to retain up to one-half of each colonist’s grant as payment for services rendered, including land surveys and title applications.  The empresarios provided powder, shot, and seed and in some cases built settlers’ cabins. The empresarios also received ten sections (6,400 acres) of premium land from the republic for each 100 families they successfully settled, and another five sections for every 100 single men.

    Insufficient previously un-appropriated land within the initial boundaries of the Peters Colony led to a request for an extension of the boundary, which was given under a second contract signed in November 1841.  This contract extended the boundaries another forty miles to the south, yet increased the number of required colonists to 800.  On November 20, back in Louisville, the Texas Agricultural, Commercial, and Manufacturing Company was incorporated, with the addition of seven Louisville associates, to help offset the absence of financial backing from the London investors.  An extensive advertising campaign was begun, extolling the virtues of immigrating to Texas.   A February 1842 ad stated, “To Emigrants – Now within the Republic of Texas, the undersigned agent of the Peters Colony takes this method to say that to all families who proceed to the Colony, make their selection, build their cabins and occupy same on or before the first day of June next, 640 acres or one section of land will be given – young men over 17 years, a half section, or 320 acres.”  That was a good deal and Americans knew it.  Lands to the east were becoming crowded and farms were beginning to play out from over-use, and a huge majority of Americans were still farmers.  The new company sent its first group of immigrants to Texas by steamboat as early as December 1841, but despite the advertising and the free land, difficulties in attracting and keeping people in this wild frontier colony caused the company to request an extension of time and another adjustment of the boundaries.

    Under the terms of a third contract, signed by Sam Houston during his second term as president of the republic on July 26, 1842, the company was given a six-month extension for the introduction of the first third of the colonists, and the boundary was extended still farther to enclose a ten-mile-wide strip on the west and a twelve-mile-wide strip on the east.

    On October 3, 1842, the concerned English investors transferred their interests to three other Englishmen and three fast-talking Americans who were each scheming for control of the colony – Daniel J. Carroll, Sherman Converse, and Charles Fenton Mercer. Converse, after also persuading the Louisville group to assign their rights to him, obtained a fourth contract with the Republic of Texas on January 20, 1843.  It gave a five-year extension, to July 1, 1848, to fulfill the contract and added over ten million acres to the west end of the colony, expanding the colony to a total of over 16,000 square miles.  When the promises that Converse had made were not fulfilled, the Louisville group, thinking themselves deceived, found additional investors and reorganized as the Texas Emigration and Land Company on October 15, 1844.  Under the leadership of Willis Stewart, an astute Louisville businessman and one of the new investors, the company made good its claim to be the true owners of the Peters colony.  The confusion over ownership, however, discouraged immigration to the colony, and by July 1, 1844, according to the company’s own agent, Ralph H. Barksdale, there were only 197 families and 184 single men in the colony.  A count in 1845 showed a total of 435 immigrants brought in by the company.

    Peters’ company was further hampered in its attempts to attract settlers by an 1845 law that called for an investigation of all colony contracts on the suspicion that they were unconstitutional.  The company only added to its problems in 1845 by employing Henry O. Hedgcoxe as its agent.  Londoner Hedgcoxe’s officious manners irritated the colonists and reinforced a commonly held suspicion that the contractors were merely land speculators who cared nothing for them or for Texas’s future.  An influx of squatters into the colony further complicated the company’s task of administering the colony.

    Among those who came to the future Collin County during the Republic of Texas period was Peter F. Lucas, who arrived in 1844, and whose son would be the namesake of the City of Lucas.  The elder Lucas was elected justice of the peace in May 1846.

Another early area settler, who would become famous because of his son, was William Edward Throckmorton.  Throckmorton was the son of Albion Throckmorton, a Revolutionary War soldier, and was born in Virginia in 1795.  He was reared and educated in Virginia and there married Elizabeth Webb.  In 1817 he graduated with a degree in medicine, and in 1821 he moved to Sparta, Tennessee.  He later moved to Illinois and in 1837 to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where his wife died, leaving five children.  In 1840 Throckmorton married Melina Wilson.  In 1841 he moved to Texas and settled near the present-day Melissa.  He died on October 2, 1843, and was buried in the Throckmorton Cemetery, two miles northwest of Melissa.  Throckmorton County, established in January 1858, was named in his honor, apparently as a compliment to his son, James W. Throckmorton, then senator and later governor of Texas.

    Another of the well-known settlers of the Peters Colony was Oliver Loving.  Loving was born in Kentucky in December 1812 to Joseph and Susannah Mary Bourland Loving.  In January 1833, he married Susan Doggett Morgan, and farmed in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky.  In 1843, Loving and his wife, his brother James and his wife Margaret, along with their sister Eveline and her husband Ellis Littlepage, and all their children, headed to Texas.  After a circuitous river trip to Shreveport, they purchased ox wagons and traveled overland the final 140 miles to Lamar County.  In 1844 most of the Lovings moved to Dallas County, but Oliver settled instead in Collin County where he operated a freighting business.  Loving received a total of 639.3 acres of land from Peters in Collin, Dallas, and Parker Counties.  In 1855 Loving moved to the future Palo Pinto County and subsequently become partners with Charles Goodnight, co-founder of the Goodnight-Loving Trail that was used to drive cattle to markets in New Mexico and Colorado after the Civil War.  These famous cowboys were the models for the famous book and movie “Lonesome Dove.”

    But the most famous of all the settlers to the area during the days of the republic was Collin McKinney.  McKinney was born April 17, 1766, in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, the second of the ten children of Daniel and Massie (Blatchley) McKinney.  That date of birth, ten years before the American Declaration of Independence was signed, meant he was born a British citizen.  Early in the 1770s he migrated with his family to Virginia colony.  In those early years the family was constantly on the move, and later the young McKinney helped provide for the family while his father fought in the Revolutionary War.

    After the war McKinney and his family moved to an outpost established by a cousin in 1788 in what later became Lincoln County, Kentucky.  In 1792 he married Annie (Amy) Moore, with whom he had four children.  After her death he married Elizabeth Leek Coleman, in 1805, and had six children with her.  He moved to Tennessee, and from 1818 to 1821 McKinney worked as the estate manager for Senator George W. Campbell, while he was overseas serving as American ambassador to Russia.  While in Tennessee, McKinney briefly operated a trading post, but he returned to Kentucky in the early 1820s, where he settled in Elkton.  From there he migrated with his family and a number of McKinney relatives to Hempstead County in Arkansas Territory, about six miles east of Texarkana.  When this area became Fayette County, Arkansas, in 1827, he was elected justice of the peace.

    While living in this frontier area McKinney became friends with Benjamin Milam, the settling agent for Arthur G. Wavell’s Red River colony in Northeast Texas.  This area was a no-man’s land, claimed by Mexico and by the United States as part of Miller County, Arkansas.  Impressed by the generous land grants offered to settlers in the Wavell Colony and fully aware that it was in disputed territory, McKinney and most of his relatives had by 1831 signed contracts with Milam and settled on their new surveys on Hickman’s Prairie.  It was a confusing situation in which to live, and while the McKinney family paid taxes, served on juries, and held county offices in Miller County, Arkansas (present-day Bowie County, Texas), at the same time they petitioned the Mexican representative in Nacogdoches for redress of grievances.

    In 1836 McKinney was one of five delegates from the Red River area to the Independence Convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos.  He was also one of five men appointed to the committee to draft the Texas Declaration of Independence.  At not quite seventy he was the oldest member of the convention, and tradition says he was given the pen used for the signing ceremony.  McKinney was also a member of the committee that produced the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, and later he was elected a delegate from Red River County to the First, Second, and Fourth congresses of the Republic.  In 1840 he joined other family members who earlier had moved to that part of Fannin County which became Grayson and Collin counties.  In 1846 he helped organize the first church in the county.  Records suggest he lived “near the line of Collin and Grayson counties.”  In time both the county and its seat would be named for McKinney.

* * *

    During the years of the Republic of Texas, the single most important route for immigrants into Collin County was the Old Preston Road.  The road was originally part of a major Indian trail that extended from near the site of St. Louis, Missouri, to southwestern Texas.  It was completed by the army in 1843.  The road started near the community of Preston Bend, on the Red River, in present Grayson County.  Emigrants either traveled on the river by steamboat, or by road to a ford known as Rock Bluff Crossing on the Red just below its confluence with the Washita River.  From there the route generally followed the divide between the East Fork and the Elm Fork of the Trinity River.  The southern terminus of the Preston Road was at the settlement of Cedar Springs, now a part of Dallas.  Texas cattlemen would later know the road as part of the Shawnee Trail, and north of the Red River it was sometimes also referred to as the Texas Road or the Military Trace.  It eventually reached Austin in the south, and in the north a fork took it all the way to Chicago.

    It has been estimated that in the spring of 1845 alone as many as 1,000 wagons crossed the Red River into Texas at Preston carrying new immigrants south.  After the Civil War, in the spring and summer of 1866, somewhere 200,000 and 260,000 cattle were herded the opposite direction to feed a beef-hungry North.  After the coming of the railroads in the 1870s and 1880s, Old Preston Road’s importance waned, though its route was largely preserved when Texas State Highway 289 was constructed in 1926.  In fact, about 1.5 miles of the old road heading south of Celina would become the first all-weather paved road in Collin County.

* * *

    After the April 1836 San Jacinto battle the military and political crisis of Texas slowly passed.  Mexican invasions did occur, but they were more in the nature of large raids than genuine attempts to re-take Texas.  And the ad interim government of President David G. Burnet was replaced by an elected one headed by President Sam Houston on October 22, 1836.  So besides the twin needs of more money and more settlers, the main issue that needed to be addressed by Texas and Texans was what to do with the Indian population, which still vastly out-numbered all other inhabitants.

    The Burnet government had sought to defer the Indian question until the war with Mexico ended and a new government could take over.  As a result, the republic’s first Indian agent was merely instructed to secure Indian neutrality while avoiding any specific treaties.  Meanwhile, ranger companies would be organized, just in case neutrality did not work – one hand extended in friendship while the other held a weapon.  The Indians were becoming restless too.  One engagement between them and a ranger force took place on the San Gabriel River in the summer, and on May 19, the northern Comanches and their Kiowa allies raided Fort Parker, killing several, and taking five captives, including Cynthia Ann Parker, who would become the mother of the famous Chief Quanah Parker.  The Cherokees and associated groups were also restless, because their land titles had not been ratified, Mexican agents were still stirring up trouble among them, and more and more white settlers were advancing into their territory.

    Houston, who had lived among the Cherokees in Arkansas, favored a policy of peace, friendship, and commerce, but also understood the need for force when necessary, especially when dealing with the western Indians.  On December 5, 1836, he signed a new law sending agents out to the Indians; empowering the president to make treaties with and distribute presents to the tribes; establishing blockhouses, forts, and trading posts; providing for a battalion of mounted riflemen to guard the frontier; and authorizing Houston to call out the militia whenever necessary.

    On July 1, 1835, the Caddo Indians still in Louisiana had made a treaty with the United States to relinquish their lands in that area and to move outside the boundaries of the United States and never return.  In 1837 Houston protested this action, and asked the United States government to supply troops to restrain them.  The Americans refused of course, but fortunately the Caddoes were largely peaceful anyway.  In April 1838 the Choctaws from near Fort Towson in the Indian Territory clashed with white settlers south of the Red River, and in that summer some of the Cherokees and other East Texas Indians, allied with Mexican agents under Vicente Córdova, took part in the Córdova Rebellion.  The Comanches continued to be active in the west, prosecuting periodic raids on white settlements, including an August 1838 attack by 200 warriors on San Antonio.  Despite opposition from a majority of Congress, Houston continued his policy of treaty-making by concluding agreements with the Tonkawas at Bexar on November 22, 1837, with the Lipan Apaches at Live Oak Point on January 8, 1838, with the Tonkawas again on April 10, 1838 at Houston, with the Comanches at Houston on May 29, 1838, and with the Kichais, Tawakonis, Wacos, and Taovayas near the mouth of the Washita at Shawnee Village in what is now Fannin County on September 2, 1838.  Unfortunately, Congress failed to ratify most of these treaties.

    In December 1838, Texas’s second president, Mirabeau B. Lamar, was sworn into office.  President Lamar’s approach to the Indian question was much more popular with his constituents than Houston’s had been.  He intended that the Indians must be either destroyed or driven from Texas, and quickly repudiated virtually every treaty Houston had approved.  The Cherokees had no rights to their lands in East Texas, he argued, and Houston had erred in signing the Cherokee treaty of February 23, 1836.  Congress also passed new laws strengthening the military.  War was the inevitable result.  In July 1839 the Cherokee War broke out, resulting in the destruction of the tribe and some of their allies, including the previously peaceful Caddoes.  Their leader, Chief Bowles, was a friend of Houston’s and died carrying a sword Houston had given him as a gift.  The Comanches prosecuted a number of massacres and there were battles at San Antonio, San Saba, Colorado City, and Belton.  In August 1840 a band of 1,000 Comanches raided and killed as far south as Victoria, Gonzalez, and Linnville on Matagorda Island.  Many of those Comanches were killed in a fight at Plum Creek, and still more at a second battle near Colorado City.

    On May 22, 1841, much closer to home, a company of men commanded by Colonel Edward H. Tarrant attacked the Indians of Keechi Village about six miles east of the site of Fort Worth.  Among those who fought with Tarrant were Collin County resident John Yeary and Methodist minister Captain John Bunyan Denton.  It was in this fight that Denton was instantly killed by a bullet that hit his chest as he raised his rifle to fire.  It was this same Denton and Tarrant for whom local counties were subsequently named.

    In the end, Lamar’s policies cost the government about $2.5 million, and resulted in many deaths on both sides.  But those who favored the Indians’ removal thought the price was worth it.  The Cherokees were gone and their good farms taken over by whites, just as had happened in Georgia.  The Comanches had been punished and pushed back.  The Shawnees had been relocated to Oklahoma; many of the Caddoes had been moved to the Brazos River area (from which they were ultimately removed to Oklahoma too, in 1859).  The only exception to removal or destruction came in January 1840 when the Alabama and Coushatta Indians were given two leagues each of East Texas land, thus becoming the first, and for many years the only, Indian reservation in Texas.  Clearly, at the cost of many lives and much money, the frontier had been rolled back and huge areas opened up to settlement by new white immigrants.

    Houston returned to office as president from December 1841-44.  He and Secretary of State Anson Jones (who would be Texas’s fourth and last president) again favored a peaceful approach to the tribes, saying it was both “more humane and cheaper” than Lamar’s policies.  The Caddoes indicated their desire to make agreements with the government of Texas, and on August 26, 1842, a treaty was concluded at the Caddo village above the Chickasaw nation, in which these friendly Indians agreed to visit some twenty hostile tribes and seek to persuade them to join in the first of a series of councils with the Texas commissioners. Trouble was always close by, however.

    In 1842 there were probably only about 200 Indians living in all of Collin County.  That meant they still outnumbered the handful of whites in the area, though these Delawares, Tonkawas, Kickapoos, and Cherokees were no threat.  The Comanches, on the other hand, remained quite active, and largely for that reason, the only white settlement in the county in 1842 was still the Throckmorton stockade, a scattering of cabins just north of today’s Melissa.  Sometime during that year, a small group ventured out to open a new settlement on Ten Mile Creek (later re-named Wilson Creek), possibly in or near today’s Fairview, but they were driven away by Indians – probably raiding Comanches.  Unharmed but frightened, the little group of settlers relocated and joined John McGarrah in establishing Buckner.

    In that same year, three men and their families settled on Honey Creek, about three miles north of McKinney.  These brave souls included Wesley Clements (or Clemmons) Samuel Young, and “Peg” Whistler (or Whisler).  Around Christmas, while Sam Young was in Fort Inglish, or Bonham, getting supplies, Comanches suddenly attacked.  Clements and Whistler were outdoors clearing land for spring farming.  Caught out in the open, the men tried desperately to run to their one completed cabin for protection and weapons, but they were both cut down, dead, before they got there.  Mrs. Young, Mrs. Clements, and some of their children bravely locked themselves inside the cabin and held the Indians at bay until nightfall.  Two stories are told about Mrs. Whistler.  The first suggests she and her children wisely stayed behind at Throckmorton until the new cabins were finished, and so took no part in the tragic events.  The second, more exciting version, relates that she was down by the creek at the time of the attack, and hearing the fight hid under the water using a reed to breathe until she thought she was safe.  At any rate, under cover of darkness the women and children all managed to follow Honey Creek down to the East Fork of the Trinity, and then follow the river back to the Throckmorton settlement and safety.

    On December 26, what was almost certainly the same band of Comanches attacked another cabin, this one on Wilson Creek.  Joe Wilcox, David Helms, and James Harlan successfully fought off their attackers.

    Only two months later, in February 1843, a second attack was beaten off.  Sadly, though, in this latter raid a Dr. Calder was killed and scalped at nearby Buckner.  Too late for Calder, Clements and Whistler, Houston completed several new Indian treaties the following summer.

    The council for which Houston had secured the Caddoes’ help, was held in March 1843 at Tehuacana Creek.  It was attended by the Delaware, Caddo, Waco, Shawnee, Hainai, Anadarko, Tawakoni, Wichita, and Kichai tribes.  They each agreed that all hostilities should cease between them and the whites and that they would attend a grand council with all the Texas tribes at Fort Bird on the Trinity River in September.  On August 9, a temporary treaty was even made at the Comanche encampment on the Red River with Pah-hah-yuco, a Comanche chief who agreed to visit all the various Comanche bands to try to induce them to treat with the Texans.  All hostilities were to cease until the general council.  The September council resulted in a permanent treaty on September 29, 1843, with the Delawares, Chickasaws, Wacos, Tawakonis, Kichais, Anadarkos, Hainais, Biloxis, and Cherokees participating.

    The Comanches, still smarting from events at the Council House Fight in 1840, refused to attend this meeting, as did the Wichitas.  But on October 9 at Tehuacana Creek, the Comanches finally appeared to meet Houston himself, to exchange gifts and speeches, and to sign a treaty reiterating the provisions of the one made on September 29.

    Even so, that same autumn, Jeremiah Muncey and his family were massacred by Comanches at their home in north Plano just north of present-day Plano Road on the southwest bank of Rowlett Creek near the Jupiter Road/Spring Creek intersection.  The Indians had camped upstream the night before.  As they proceeded down Rowlett Creek, they came upon two boys, named Joe Rice and Searcy, hunting.  Rice was killed, but Searcy got away.  The Comanche raiders continued down the creek to the Muncey place.  The Muncey home was a typical lean-to that they were using while they built a more substantial house.  The lean-to could not provide the protection a thick log house might have, and Jeremiah Muncey, his wife, a three-year-old child, and neighbor McBain Jameson were all killed.  Two of the Munceys’ sons were taken captive and never seen again.  In 1844, two more local whites, young boys named Alred, were killed.

    Tragically too late, on January 24, 1845, a Comanche treaty was ratified by the Senate and signed into law on February 5 by Anson Jones, the former secretary of state to whom Houston had handed over the presidency in December.  Only the Wichitas remained untouched by treaty; they did not appear at the third general council, at which no treaty was made since all the groups represented were already covered by previously signed agreements.  But the patient perseverance of Houston and his commissioners was finally effective, for at the fourth and last of the general councils, on November 16, 1845, at the Torrey Trading House near the mouth of Tehuacana Creek, where all of the grand councils had been held, the Wichitas at last appeared.  Again Indians and white men resolved their differences, and the last treaty was signed.  A few days later, a final distribution of presents was made and the Indian affairs of the Republic of Texas were officially brought to an end.

    In December 1845 Texas joined the United States.  Jones stayed in office through February 1846 to ensure a smooth transition to the new state government.  During its slightly less than ten year existence, Texas’s non-Indian population had grown from 30,000 to over 135,000, including about 35,000 slaves.

STATEHOOD

    In February 1846 the new state’s first legislature convened in the new state capital of Austin, which was still very much a part of the wild frontier and which despite Houston’s Indian treaties, continued to suffer periodic Comanche raids.  Between March 17 and April 11, the legislature divided the huge Fannin County into more manageable pieces, laying them out in today’s familiar straight lines and blocks as first suggested by early settler and Texas leader Collin McKinney.  Carved out were the modern counties of Collin, Grayson, Dallas, Hunt, and Denton.  Collin County was of course named for McKinney himself.  In the act that created the county, approved on April 3, was included wording that appointed Jack McGarrah, John C. M. Hodge (who was also appointed notary public for the new county), Thomas Rattan, Ashley McKinney, and Pleasant Wilson as commissioners whose job it was to find the geographical center of the newly-established county, select two places within three miles of the center, and hold an election to determine which of those two would become the location of the new county seat.  The entire white population of the new county was estimated at about 150.

    Buckner was a trading post and small town about three miles northwest of the present location of downtown McKinney, and had grown up around a few cabins starting in 1842.  Buckner was the only town of any size at all in Collin County.  Commissioner Jack McGarrah ran a blacksmith shop and a small store out of his cabin there, and Buckner was the only place within forty miles where store goods could be purchased.  (The McGarrah Cemetery is today located near Lake Forest Drive in McKinney, between Virginia and Eldorado Parkways.)  On July 4, about 75 settlers attended a meeting at Buckner and decided that it should be the county seat.  No surveys had been done, so it was not known just where the geographic center of the county was, but Buckner seemed like the only logical place for the county seat, and it was at least somewhat centrally located, and probably very close to the rather arbitrary three mile standard established in Austin.

On August 1 McGarrah donated fifty acres of his own land as a town site.  The town was laid off in lots of eighty feet square, with a public square in the center for the court house.  On September 1 lots were sold at auction, all entirely on credit.  A log courthouse was erected and on October 18, Judge John T. Mills of Bonham opened the first district court session in Collin County.  In November, the U. S. Postmaster established a post office at Buckner, and named Jack McGarrah the first postmaster.  The town was well on its way.  But there were those not pleased with the selection, and they happily pointed out that the legislature’s instructions had not been carried out.  Two sites were to have been selected and an election was to have been conducted between the two “contestants” before a seat was finalized.  And so on January 12, 1848, the state government passed new legislation that called for “establishing more permanently the seat of Justice in Collin County.”

Early Map Showing Area Counties

A survey was finally conducted and to the horror of Buckner-backers, it was not within the statutory three miles.  Instead, the center was found to be near the banks of the East Fork of the Trinity River, about three miles east southeast of present-day downtown McKinney.  In the election that followed on March 16, Buckner would not even be considered.  Instead, the two locations submitted to the voters were McKinney and Sloan’s Grove, about three miles to its south.  It is not known precisely where Sloan’s Grove was, but it must have been along Sloan Creek, probably in the Sloan Survey.  (Sloan was one of those Texan Revolution veterans who never settled on his land in Collin County.)   At any rate, it appears almost certain that Sloan’s Grove was located within today’s Fairview.  On the day of the election, high water in the East Fork and in Wilson Creek prevented settlers from the southern and eastern parts of the county from reaching Buckner to cast their votes.  As a result, McKinney was selected by a margin of ten to one.  Thus was Collin McKinney doubly honored, with the county named for him in 1846 and its seat of government in 1848.   The first courthouse there was built in that same year from pine lumber hauled in from East Texas and covered in bur oak planking.  On March 24, 1849, William Davis, who owned 3,000 acres where McKinney now stands, donated 120 acres for the town site.  Ten years later McKinney was formally incorporated.

* * *

    Creating new counties was only one of many tasks before the new state legislature.  In 1848 it established a committee to investigate the various colonies.  A similar committee had been created by the Republic’s legislature in 1845, but its work was never done due to subsequent annexation into the United States.  The new committee learned that the expansive Peters Colony of North Texas had managed to bring in over 600 new settlers, but this number was well below its contractual requirement.  Surprisingly, the committee also discovered that the area’s total non-Indian population was close to 2,200.  That meant squatters – settlers who had simply come to Texas, picked out a piece of land, and taken it over for a homestead – outnumbered everyone else.  Squatting was illegal of course, but by the time a man or a family had lived on, farmed, and otherwise improved a parcel of land, it sure felt like his and he was not likely to give it up easily.

    The Peters Colony contract expired on July 1, 1848, but that was not the end of the company’s problems.  The Republic’s government had cleverly reserved half of the colony lands for itself when granting contracts, so land within the colony was now opened to the free laying of certificates that permitted new settlers to obtain grants of 640 acres directly from the state.  That rankled some of the old settlers who had come earlier and had risked more, yet received the same amount of land.  But what really angered these old settlers was the company’s claim to own up to half of what the colonists considered their land.  The contracts had clearly provided that the investors could keep that amount of land to pay for surveying, administration, land records, etc.  But the settlers had used that acreage, and improved it, and considered it theirs, regardless of what any contract might say.

    The settlers demanded that the state legislature help them rectify what they considered a grossly unjust situation.  They attended mass meetings, signed angry petitions, and finally held a colony-wide convention in Dallas on May 21, 1849.  John H. Reagan and James W. Throckmorton, ironically neither of whom were colonists, emerged as leaders in the protest movement.  In January 1850 the legislature, under great political pressure, passed a bill backing the colonists’ claims.  The Texas Emigration and Land Company, which seemed to have a clear claim to the land, sued.  The legislature then tried to end the controversy by granting the company 1,700 sections (1,088,000 acres) of land in “floating” certificates in February 1852.  This attempt at compromise also gave the colonists new guidelines, and until July 1 to establish their claims.  The company would have 2½ years from that date to lay its certificates.  All lawsuits between the land company and the state were to be withdrawn.

    That was not good enough for the colonists, though, who were still concerned over the possible sale of some claims and angered over the legislature’s seeming generosity towards the land company.  Thus their protests continued.  On July 12, a citizens’ committee forced its way into the Collin County office of the colony’s very unpopular land agent, Henry Oliver Hedgcoxe, where they demanded an opportunity to inspect the Englishman’s records.  At a mass meeting in Dallas on the 15th, the committee issued an unfavorable report on Hedgcoxe.  The next day a group of about 100 armed men led by John J. Good attacked Hedgcoxe’s office and seized his files and removed them to the Dallas County Courthouse.  No violence broke out, but Hedgcoxe was driven from the county in the incident that became known as the Hedgcoxe War, or the Peters Colony Rebellion.  (Today’s Hedgcoxe Road in North Plano remembers the colony’s hapless land agent.)  A settlement was eventually reached, and the compromise law was amended in February 1853 to extend the deadline for colonists to file their claims to May 7, 1853.  Adjustments continued to be argued and made in both the courts and the legislature for nearly two decades more before all claims were finally settled.

    While the saga of the Peters Colony continued, immediately to its east and south, similar colonization efforts, also with very mixed results, were undertaken in the Mercer colony.  This latter colony occupied most of the areas between the Brazos and Sabine Rivers, with Waco on its southern end and McKinney in Collin County on its north, in all encompassing portions of eighteen future Texas counties.  Like the Peters Colony, the Mercer Colony traced its roots to the February 4, 1841 law renewing the old Mexican policy of granting empresario contracts to investors who agreed to settle emigrants on Texas’s vast unclaimed public lands.  Such contracts had grown very unpopular, but they were nonetheless authorized, so beginning in January 1844 President Houston executed a contract with Charles Fenton Mercer.  The contract required Mercer to settle at least 100 families a year for the next five years.  Mercer formed a colonization company, called the Texas Association, the purpose of which was to advertise and promote the colony and its many wonderful attributes.  Shares were sold to investors in Texas, Virginia, and Florida for $500 apiece.

    Colonization in the Mercer Colony met all of the same problems Peters faced – politicians, land speculators, squatters, and untamed Indians.  There were many who thought the empresario system was outright wrong and perhaps even unconstitutional.  Others thought it foolish to give away land, especially so much, when settlers were already beginning to flood into Texas, particularly after statehood in 1846.  And Mercer, it turned out, was his own worst enemy.  He was of all things, an abolitionist, in a state that was very pro-slavery.  He was a speculator, a monopolist, and an opponent of free immigration for Anglo-Americans.  He came across as greedy and arrogant, out to make a fast buck off the hard work of others.  It did not help that the very next day after Mercer’s contract was signed the Congress approved a new law ending such contracts.  The question would become whether or not that new law, passed over Houston’s veto, prevented new contracts only, or cancelled existing contracts like Peters’ and Mercer’s.  An investigation into Mercer’s colony was ordered just like the one that had been conducted into Peters’.

    Meanwhile, squatters flocked into the Mercer survey, denying the apparently legitimate claims of Mercer’s settlers.  Mercer’s immigrants also discovered that land speculators and holders of bounty and headright certificates held claims that conflicted with theirs.  And if that weren’t enough, Mercer’s surveyors reported that Robertson County, to the south, was sending its surveyors into the colony and claiming the land they surveyed as their own.  It finally became impossible for Mercer’s surveyors to work west of the Trinity River.  Daniel Rowlett worked for Mercer for parts of three years between 1844 and 1847, preparing the map that Mercer used in his promotions.  But when his life was threatened during an expedition across the Trinity, Rowlett quit.

    At first Mercer only gave 160 acres to families and eighty acres to single men. The fact that Peters was offering two to four times as much free land right next door hurt colonization until Mercer finally matched his competitor’s offer.  Even so, he got more than his quota of 100 families in the first year.  Unfortunately, following up on the 1845 investigation, in October 1846 Albert C. Horton, on behalf of the government, filed suit in district court against Mercer and the Texas Association.  The court ruled Mercer’s contract null and void, though the Texas Supreme Court reversed that decision on appeal.  In February 1850, the legislature, trying to end the confusion and conflict within the colony, guaranteed all land claims made by settlers in the Mercer colony before October 25, 1848.  A total of 1,255 land certificates were thereby recorded in the General Land Office.  Even so, the last conflict was not settled until 1936.  Mercer got out much faster, turning over his interests in the colony to other investors in February 1852.

    Despite their ultimate problems and financial failures, the Peters and Mercer Colonies were important to the settlement of North Texas and Collin County.  One of the more famous families to arrive in Collin County during this period was that of William C. Sachse and his wife Elizabeth Straly Sachse.  Mrs. Straly received an original land grant of 320 acres patented in the Peters colony in 1846.  Her husband died, and she subsequently married Sachse, a native of Prussia.  A community would be organized in 1886 that would bear the Sachse name.

    The vast majority of the first settlers of Collin County were farmers who lived near streams, like the Indians before them, where water and wood were easily obtained. They established small, family-operated farms that produced mostly wheat and corn. The slave and cotton economy that characterized most of the South, with its large plantations and farms, failed to take hold in the county. This was in large part a result of the lack of navigable rivers and railroads to transport cash crops to retail centers. The nearest market was Jefferson, then a busy river port, more than 150 miles to the east.  A majority of Collin County’s farmers came from the Upper South and Middle States like Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, and Kentucky.  They were therefore less likely to be familiar with the growth of cotton, and much less likely too to own slaves than were their Deep South counterparts that settled East Texas.

    In 1850 the average taxable value of land per acre in Collin County was 75 cents, up from the previous year by seven cents.  The population of Collin County in the 1850 decennial census, the first after Texas’s annexation into the United States was 1,950, including 134 slaves.  The census listed over 87% of heads of households as farmers.  Other occupations included 15 carpenters, 7 physicians, 7 blacksmiths, 4 lawyers, a school teacher, 3 surveyors, 7 preachers of various faiths, 2 stonemasons, 2 teamsters, a constable, 2 “waders,” 2 wagonmakers, a miller, a hotel keeper, and ten other occupations.  Two men were curiously listed as “doing nothing.”  The most common state of birth was Missouri at 27.5%.  Some 14.2% came from Arkansas, 12.9% from Tennessee, and 11% from Kentucky.

    Among those enumerated were the now familiar family names of George and Nancy McKinney, James Throckmorton and his wife Ann, William C. McKinney and his wife Margaret (whose property was valued at a whopping $4,500), Collin McKinney (then 84 years old and the owner of 29 slaves) and his wife Elizabeth, William Fitzhugh (born in Kentucky in 1818), John L. Lovejoy, Sr. (the hotel keeper, who was also referred to in other documents as both a minister and the operator of a dry goods store in Buckner), Henry Wetsell (a carpenter) and his wife Nancy (both from Pennsylvania), Robert Fitzhugh, Peter Wetsell (a carpenter like his father), Jno. and Sarah Fitzhugh, the not-yet-famous Oliver Loving and his wife Susan, Gabe and Frances Fitzhugh, George H. (a coroner) and Sarah Lucas, Caleb Hart, George Fitzhugh, Peter F. and Mary Lucas (who arrived in 1844), George and Mary Lovejoy, and the Prussian, William Sachse and his wife Elizabeth.  The Gabe Fitzhugh Survey is where today’s Fairview Farms subdivision is located, on the south side of Stacy Road.  George Fitzhugh’s survey is immediately west, located in today’s far northeastern Allen, and including the site of Lovejoy Elementary School.  The Henry Wetsell (also spelled Wetzel, and Wetsel) Survey was located just southwest of modern Fairview, and the Lucas and Lovelady surveys were located to the southeast, in present-day Lucas.  One of Wetsell’s daughters married James Roberts, who was in turn the namesake of the James Roberts survey, and also Roberts Branch of Sloan Creek.  Roberts Branch separates the present-day Fairview subdivisions of River Oaks from Hawkswood and the Domain.

    Other very early area settlers included Silas Herrington (arriving in 1845), J. W. Ballard from Kentucky (1855), Jonathon Cook from Missouri (1852), the Kerby family from Missouri (1845), and James H. Lovejoy, who served as deputy sheriff from 1849-54 and later as a deputy U.S. marshal.

Also, sometime between 1844 and 1848 William Snider and his wife, the former Mary Sandusky Maxwell and their nine children arrived in Collin County.  William was born in March 1806 in Kentucky; Mary was also a Kentuckian, born in 1812.  A tenth child, daughter Martha, was born in Texas, presumably in Collin County in 1848.  Ann and Alvin followed in 1851 and 1853.  Snider was a carpenter and was one of the two wagon makers listed in the 1850 census.  He owned a 640 acre tract of land southeast of McKinney, in the Forest Grove community near today’s southeastern Fairview and northern Lucas boundary.  The family lived near Snider Lake, where William operated a bois d’arc “mill.”  There he crushed bois ’d’arc apples and dropped the resulting pulp into barrels of water.  The seeds settled to the bottom, where they were collected, dried, and sold.  He also raised horses and bees, and even had a beehive under glass inside his log cabin.  His corn mill was supposed to be the first in the county, and a yoke of oxen was used to power a small cotton mill.

    Life for these farming people was hard.  Many women died in childbirth, men married multiple times, and families were usually quite large.  Most settlers were conservatively religious and introduced many new congregations into Collin County.  Among those seven ministers listed on the 1850 census were a Cumberland Presbyterian (the Walnut Grove C. P. Church was started in 1852), two Methodists, an Episcopal Methodist, and three Baptists.  In either 1845 or 1847 William “Uncle Billy” and Mary Sandusky Snider and Mr. and Mrs. James Anderson founded a Disciples of Christ congregation that met in various houses and a school.  When attendance became too large to continue that practice, George Fitzhugh invited them to meet in his larger home.  This group evolved into the later-day Forest Grove Christian Church and its associated burial ground, Fitzhugh Cemetery.  A tract of land for the church was donated by John M. McKinney in 1857.  Ironically, his wife Eliza died that same year.  This was also the site of a large brush arbor used for religious meetings in the years immediately after the Civil War, which once boasted a meeting of some 2,000 souls.

    The adjacent cemetery, founded in 1852, went on to become a virtual “who’s who” of area history.  The first burials there were the infant children of Robert and Katharine Fitzhugh.  Columbus W. Fitzhugh died April 17, 1852 at the age of only fifteen months.  His sister Isabell died on August 11, 1853 at an even younger ten months.  Also among the oldest graves are those of Julia A. McKinney, 1856; James G. Kerby, also 1856; and Eliza J. McKinney, 1857.  Peter Lucas died on October 16, 1858; Gabriel Fitzhugh, the very next month, on November 7, 1858.  It was Gabe who donated the land for the cemetery, with the stipulation that when he died he would be buried under a group of large trees near the entrance.  Other well-known family names include Coffey, Christian, and Wetsel.  Many more members of the McKinney and Fitzhugh families are there, and a group of slaves is buried in the cemetery’s southeast corner.  William and Mary Snider were buried here as well, though much later, in 1882 and 1889, respectively.

* * *

    One of the few industries in all of Collin County was the Fitzhugh Mill.  In 1853, absentee land-owner Calvin Boales sold Robert Fitzhugh 160 acres at fifty cents an acre.  This quarter section likely included the mill site and a large spring nearby.  Robert later acquired another quarter section of Boales land from his father.  Fitzhugh’s original headright was 490 acres northeast of the present intersection of Stacy Road and FM 1378.  In all he would acquire 1,384 acres, which appears on today’s records as the Robert Fitzhugh survey in eastern Fairview.  This survey is bounded by Stacy Road on the south, Wilson Creek on the north, and FM 1378 on the west.  It includes today’s Kentucky Lane, and most of Heritage Ranch.

    Robert began his enterprise with the purchase of a thresher in 1853, the first such machinery in Collin County.  The steam driven thresher and milling equipment would have had to be hauled either from Jefferson, the nearest river port, or Galveston, the nearest ocean port, by wagon, a truly remarkable feat.  And because of its very rarity, the steam engine, which may have been used to power the area’s first mill as well as the thresher, proved to be very economically successful.  At one point Robert’s machinery would be valued at $5,220, a huge sum for an area still on the frontier and that had seen its first white settler only a few years before.  In 1857, on a spring near Wilson Creek, Fitzhugh began operation of the gristmill that would bear his name.  (This mill may also have been referred to as the Snider Mill at one time, as there was a Snider Mill Road that once supposedly led to it; William Snider is credited with building and operating the first corn mill here.)  The gristmill was later described as the best in the county, and was likely the first driven by steam.  Before Fitzhugh opened the mill, grain and corn had to be hauled to Sherman or sometimes as far away as Jefferson for grinding.  One of the millers working for Fitzhugh was “Uncle” John Campbell.  Campbell brought his family from Tennessee along with kinsmen the Faires and Kirkpatrick families, and settled near the mill.

    John and George Fitzhugh had operated a mill in Missouri before moving to Collin County.  John and his son William added to the gristmill by building a sawmill.  The sawmill also used a steam engine, driven by a boiler using water from Wilson Creek, to saw timber.  Except for his original headright, which was open prairie land used for farming, most of Robert’s land was heavily forested.  It was these trees along Wilson Creek and the East Fork of the Trinity River that were harvested for the timber produced by the sawmill.  In 1858, John and William sold their mill interests to Robert.  In November of that same year contractors hired by the county to build a wooden bridge across Wilson Creek reported that “…the Fitzhugh steam mill is broke so that they cannot get lumber to complete said bridge…”

    Another Collin County mill was located at Millwood, south of the present town of Lavon.  This mill used an inclined tread wheel until the mid-1850s, when a steam engine was installed.  The mill burned shortly before the Civil War began, and many blamed abolitionist troublemakers.  Whatever the cause of the mill’s demise, its boiler and engine were moved to the Fitzhugh Mill, where they were used for many more years.

    In addition to his successful milling pursuits, Robert Fitzhugh served from 1848 to 1854 as Collin County’s second sheriff.  His brother William served with the Texas Rangers.

    Adjacent to the highly successful and extremely important mill, was Fitzhugh Spring.   As late as 1946, horse-drawn wagons would stop at the Fitzhugh Spring so that both horses and their drivers could drink the cool clear water.  A cattle and sheep dip was even built at the site, near the present-day CR317 and CR323 intersection.  There was also a general store at that same intersection.  This area was the site of an old Tonkawa or Delaware Indian camp, and arrowheads have been found there.

    One of the oldest houses in today’s Fairview was built near the mill site.  This house, like the mill site, is now owned by the Willis family.  It is today still supplied by naturally flowing spring water, as it has been for over 100 years.

* * *

    One other major event occurred in Texas during this period, although its impact on Collin County was probably minimal.  In April 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico.  The sole source of conflict was Texas.  Of course, most Texans were more than happy to fight their southern neighbors.  Conflict had continued off and on for ten years, and many Texans still remembered the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad.  Texans were therefore quick to volunteer to fight.  Among those volunteers were Governor J. Pinckney Henderson and Collin County residents James Webb Throckmorton, George Washington Smith, John McKinney, and William F. Fitzhugh.

    Fitzhugh was the son of John and Sarah Shelton Fitzhugh, and was born in Kentucky in 1818.  As a child he moved with his parents to Missouri, and at the age of seventeen he volunteered for service in the Seminole War in Florida.  After returning to Missouri he participated in the campaign to expel the Mormons from that state.  In 1845 he moved to Texas with his parents and settled just south of the site of present Melissa.  He married Mary Rattan and received a 640-acre headright.  During the Mexican War he and Smith both served in the First Regiment of Texas Mounted Volunteers, commanded by Colonel John Coffee “Jack” Hays.  Fitzhugh rose to the rank of captain.  In 1847 Fitzhugh led a group of Texas Rangers to Cooke County where they constructed a small log stockade enclosing a row of blockhouses and a stable.  The fort was abandoned in 1850, but during its short life it was known as Fort Fitzhugh.

     Throckmorton, future governor of Texas and Congressman, was the son of Elizabeth Webb and William Edward Throckmorton, and was born on February 1, 1825 at Sparta, Tennessee.  One of eight children, Throckmorton spent the first eleven years of his life in Sparta, where his father practiced medicine.  In 1836 Dr. Throckmorton moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas and later, in 1841, to Texas, where within a year he died.  Following the death of his father, the younger Throckmorton spent a year helping his family settle in their new home two miles northwest of the present site of Melissa.  After assuring his family’s safety, he left Texas to study medicine with his uncle, James E. Throckmorton, in Kentucky, where he remained until the war broke out.  He quickly returned to Texas and volunteered for service, joining Captain Robert H. Taylor’s company as a private in February 1847.  He served less than three months in the field, due to illness, probably with some sort of kidney problem.  Because of his medical training Throckmorton was reassigned as a surgeon’s assistant with the Texas Rangers.  The Rangers were used as scouts and cavalry throughout the war.  By March 1847, General Zachary Taylor had pushed all Mexican armies out of northern Mexico.  Throckmorton served with Taylor’s army at Monterrey, Saltillo, and Buena Vista before his health became so bad that he was discharged on June 8, 1847, and returned to Collin County.  (Sometime probably in the late 1840s, Throckmorton renamed Ten Mile Creek, originally so-called because that was the distance from its banks to the Throckmorton settlement.  But the future governor of Texas supposedly renamed the creek in honor of his hunting companion and fellow county Democrat, Pleasant Wilson, who also served as one of the commissioners who settled the county seat issue.  It is interesting to note that Throckmorton’s mother’s maiden name was also Wilson.  Wilson Creek today crosses much of Fairview.)

    John Meyers McKinney was born in Surrey County, North Carolina in 1781.  He was the son of James and Mary (Ballard) McKinney, and in 1809 he married Peggy Margot Lee.  They migrated to Texas from Arkansas in 1846.  McKinney soon thereafter left to fight in the Mexican War.  He died in 1847 while in the service of Captain William Fitzhugh’s Company of Bell’s Mounted Volunteers.  Fitzhugh was a fellow resident of Collin County, who migrated to Texas in 1845.  Fitzhugh was also a veteran of the Seminole Wars and the Mormon uprising in Missouri.

    In September of that same year General Winfield Scott’s army (which included such future luminaries as U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee) marched into Mexico City, thus ending the war.  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848 set the final boundary between Texas and Mexico, and also added California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona to the United States.  Fitzhugh returned to Collin County in 1848, where he divided his time between farming and serving with the Texas Rangers against the Indians.

* * *

    Back in May 1846, federal commissioners had met Comanche, Waco, Wichita, and Caddo Indian representatives at the old council grounds on Tehuacana Creek and executed a treaty in which the Indians acknowledged the authority of the federal government.  Upon the end of the Mexican War in 1848, federal troops moved to the Texas frontier and established a new line of forts extending from Fort Worth to the site of Eagle Pass.  In December 1850, a new treaty was concluded with the Comanche, Caddo, Lipan Apache, Quapaw, Tawakoni, and Waco Indians.  In October 1851 a second general treaty was approved.  But the rush of goldseekers to California brought hordes of intruders across Indian lands, clamor for the settlement of western Texas mounted, land grants were made to the new railroads, buffalo hunters intensified the slaughter of the Plains Indians’ principle source of survival, and many tribes began raiding again. 

    In 1852 the state decided to establish two Indian reservations in which all the eastern tribes would be confined.  In 1854 the legislature set aside approximately 70,000 acres for the reservations.  The Brazos Reserve was for the Anadarkos, Caddoes, Ionies, Kichais, Tawakonis, Tonkawas, Wacos, and other semi-agricultural tribes, totaling about 1,110 people.  The Clear Fork Reserve was for the Penateka Comanches.  By 1856 most of the Indians from the eastern half of Texas had been rounded up and moved to one of these reservations.  But trouble between the reds and greedy whites was inevitable and by 1858 local settlers began to agitate to have the reservation Indians expelled from Texas.  In September 1859, escorted by soldiers and rangers, the 1,000 or so reservation Indians crossed the Red River into Indian Territory and out of Texas for the last time.

    Probably the last band of Indians to call Collin County home were a group of Kiowas led by a chief named Spotted Tail, who lived somewhere between today’s Frisco and Prosper.  Spotted Tail was a friend to the whites dating back to the mid-1840s.  In 1873 he even helped bury the dead from a local smallpox epidemic.  Sadly, he contracted the disease himself and died shortly thereafter.  Before he died he requested a “white man’s burial” and was buried at the Buckner Cemetery in McKinney.  The last of his Kiowas disappeared from the county, and from Texas, shortly afterwards.

    Another well-known Indian who became assimilated into the white culture of Collin County was Frank House.  House was a Chickasaw who was supposed to have come to the area in 1841.  He lived in McKinney until his death in the 1920s.

* * *

   

The first stage coach line ran through Collin County from McKinney to Dallas in the 1850s.  By the 1860s the Sawyer and Fisher stage line provided daily service between Bonham and Waco, by way of McKinney and Dallas.  Stations were maintained by the stage line about every fifteen miles.  Sawyer and Fisher had shortened the trip in 1858 by re-routing the road from Dallas to McKinney to cross Wilson Creek in Fairview.  During the 1870s there was a toll bridge where the route crossed Wilson Creek.  Before the change to this new route, which pretty much follows today’s SH 5, the stage had to go about five miles west before turning south toward Dallas on the Cedar Springs to Bonham Road.  Even after the change, the entire trip from Bonham to Waco took four days.

CONFEDERACY

    In 1860 there were 182,566 black slaves living in Texas.  That meant about 30% of all the non-Indian population were slaves.  Another 355 free blacks lived in 1860 Texas.  In Collin County, whose total population had risen to 9,264 since the previous census, the percentage of the overall total who were in bondage was just over 11%, or 1,047.  Most people were still farmers, as they would be for almost another century, but corn, wheat, oats, and cattle predominated, so slavery was less important than in counties that produced large amounts of cotton, sugar cane, and rice.  As a result, when Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first Republican president in November 1860, the event caused much less consternation than it did in most of the rest of the South.

    It was in this environment that James Throckmorton made one of many courageous stands in his life.  Following his recovery from the kidney illness that had kept him out of combat in the Mexican War, Throckmorton left Texas again to marry Annie Rattan in 1848 in Illinois.  The couple returned to Texas and built a home just outside McKinney, where Throckmorton began his medical practice and fathered the first of what would be ten children.  He quickly established himself as one of the more prominent members of the community, and invested in real estate, read law, promoted education, and participated in church affairs.  His interest in education led him to financially support the establishment of the Mantua Seminary, seven miles north of McKinney.

    Although a successful doctor, Throckmorton found he simply did not like the practice of medicine. And so he dissolved his medical practice and became a partner in the law firm of R. DeArmond and Thomas Jefferson Brown.  Politics had always intrigued Throckmorton, so in 1851 he decided to try his hand at running for office.  Like his father, Throckmorton identified with the Whig party.  The Whigs were a party in the decline, but Throckmorton was elected in 1851 to the first of three terms in the Texas House of Representatives, serving the Twenty-fifth District, which included both Collin and Denton counties.  Over the next six years, Throckmorton helped to negotiate a settlement of disputed land titles of early Texas settlers, especially those involving the Peters colony.  As chairman of the Internal Improvement Committee he advocated land grants to establish free public schools and the construction of a statewide railroad network.  In 1857 he was elected to the Texas Senate as a Democrat.  The Whigs had ceased to exist.

    In that 1857 election he supported Sam Houston for governor.  Houston was much admired and loved by Texans, revered as a great hero.  But Houston was a unionist in a state that overwhelmingly supported states’ rights.  Both Houston’s stand and Throckmorton’s support were unpopular, and Houston was defeated by Democrat Hardin R. Runnels.  Two years later, Throckmorton again ran for the Senate and Houston for the governorship.  This time both men won.  The state senator from McKinney became a political advisor to the governor and Houston’s ally in attempting to restrain the forces within Texas who favored secession.  Throckmorton’s attempt to organize a state Union party attracted painfully few supporters though, and he watched helplessly as secession became ever more popular.

    Against Houston’s wishes, a Secession Convention met in January 1861.  Its purpose was to consider whether or not Texas should withdraw from the Union and join the newly formed Confederate States of America.  Throckmorton was elected to attend the convention, which voted in favor of secession by a vote of 166 to 7.  Throckmorton was one of the seven who voted against.  A statewide election was held on February 23.  Secession was approved by a vote of about 46,129 to 14,697.  By county, 104 voted yes, only 18 voted no, including ten largely German counties around Austin.   Most Mexican-Texans voted against as well, as did three North Texas counties.  Among those was Collin County, which voted against secession by a total of 948 to 405.

    Shortly after the vote, Governor Houston received a message from Lincoln offering to send troops to Texas to help him keep the state in the Union.  Asked his opinion, Throckmorton argued against taking such drastic action, concluding the state might not survive a civil war within its own borders.  When Texas officially joined the Confederacy on March 5, Houston was instructed to swear an oath of loyalty to the new nation.  He refused and was removed from office.  He could neither fight for the Confederacy nor against Texas.  Broken-hearted, he died two years later.

    For Throckmorton, however, the decision was different.  Although he opposed secession, once it was approved, he knew, like other men such as Robert E. Lee who also opposed secession, his first loyalty would be to his state.  Thus he was one of the first men from Collin County to join the new Confederate army.  In fact he helped organize over 100 men into the Company of Mounted Riflemen from Collin County in May.  The company secured Forts Wichita and Arbuckle on the frontier after they were evacuated by U.S. troops who marched east to fight their countrymen.  Following the dissolution of the company in August, Throckmorton joined the 6th Texas Cavalry, and fought in the battles at Chustennallah and Elkhorn Tavern, Arkansas.  He also saw action in Mississippi and Louisiana, but his kidney illness again recurred, and he was subsequently discharged from service on September 12, 1863.

    In all, slightly more than 1,500 men from Collin County enlisted in one of the eighteen local companies mustered into Confederate service, and fought over the war’s four bloody years on battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania.  John Campbell, a miller at the Fitzhugh mill, was among those who enlisted in the Confederate army.  It was decided, however, he would be of greater service to the Confederacy in his civilian job, so he was returned to run the mill, which he did throughout the war and for years afterward.

    Another Collin County man, Thomas Morton Scott, joined the Confederate army almost at the outset of fighting.  Morton was a Mexican War veteran who had moved from Kentucky in 1852.  He helped raise Company I of the 9th Texas Infantry Regiment and was named first lieutenant.  After the horrific Battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, in Tennessee, Scott was promoted to captain.  He subsequently served on the staff of General Samuel B. Maxey, doing duty in various locations including Oklahoma, through the end of the war.

    Three brothers, John Harrison Maddox, William Maddox, and Francis Maddox, and their cousin Jim Maddox, along with Bob Lee, were also among the men from Collin County who fought with the 6th Texas Cavalry.  Lee volunteered in August 1862, told his wife and three children good-bye, and left home to fight.  Confederate cavalrymen were required to provide their own horses, clothing, and weapons, but were paid $18.50 per month.  In March 1862, the men of the 6th Texas fought at the Battle of Elkhorn’s Tavern.  They also saw action at Pea Ridge and Wilson’s Creek, before heading across the Mississippi to places like Corinth, Iuka, Vicksburg, Murphreesboro, Missionary Ridge, the siege of Atlanta, and Nashville.

    In March 1862 William F. Fitzhugh, Throckmorton’s fellow Mexican War veteran, also entered Confederate service.  He served as colonel of the 16th Texas Cavalry, a regiment that served in the Trans-Mississippi Department, and saw action in Louisiana and Mississippi.  Aaron Snider, son of William and Mary Snider of Forest Grove, also fought in Fitzhugh’s regiment.  Very few battles were fought in Texas, though.  There were fights at Brownsville, Sabine Pass, and Galveston, and a large Union army tried to invade Texas from Louisiana in 1864.  But it was stopped cold at the battle of Mansfield in April.  There were no battles in Collin County.  Even so, violence against the Unionist minority could be both sudden and horrific.

    Many of those who opposed the war followed Throckmorton’s example, joined the Confederate armies, and fought for Texas.  Others like Houston retired and stayed out of the dispute as best they could.  Still others felt so strongly that they packed up and headed north.  In fact, about 2,000 Texans, including some members of the Boren family of Collin County, went so far as to join the Union army and fight against the South.  But the most troubling group was that segment who opposed secession and the war, but stayed put and let their feelings be known.  During the war many incidents of violence occurred between these Union sympathizers and loyal Confederates.  In 1862 Christian Stelzer was killed east of Celina in Collin County.  His death was at first blamed by many neighbors on Indian raiders, but it was later revealed that he was killed in an argument over the Civil War.  A mysterious hanging was also noted to have occurred on Rowlett Creek near today’s Jupiter Road, just north of Plano.

    One group of unhappy Germans from near Austin decided they would leave Texas by way of Mexico, but they were attacked by Texas cavalry and many were killed.  In North Texas, locals did not want to hear opposition to the war while their men were off fighting, and some feared that the Peace Party, as they called themselves, were in reality no more than Union spies, draft-dodgers, and deserters.  The paranoia and anger, mixed with some forever-unknown level of guilt, led to the 1862 arrest and trial of forty local residents for treason.  Neither the arrests nor the trials were legal, but the men and one woman were convicted nonetheless, and all were hanged.  Two others were shot and killed amidst the confusion.  These gruesome proceedings, known to history as The Great Hanging at Gainesville, unfortunately included the participation of an undetermined number of Collin County residents.  Such outbreaks of violence continued even after the war’s end.

    As for Throckmorton, he returned to the state senate in 1864, again representing Collin and Grayson counties.  In December 1864 he was made a brigadier general in the state’s First Frontier District.  In 1865 he assumed the role of Confederate Indian commissioner.  He successfully negotiated a number of treaties with tribes on the frontier, who nicknamed him “Old Leathercoat.”

    In April 1865 Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was surrendered.  The other main Confederate army, under Joseph E. Johnston, surrendered in North Carolina a few days later.  The final battle of the war was fought at Palmetto Ranch in far South Texas in mid-May.  William Fitzhugh returned home safely about this time and went back to farming at Melissa.

RECONSTRUCTION

    The Civil War is the bloodiest conflict in which Americans ever fought.  Records were not always good, but it is likely that as many as 600,000 died, more than in all other American wars combined.  Its impact was dramatic.  Never before had the country had so many widows and orphans at one time.  Breadwinners were gone, and women were forced to take care of family farms and businesses.  The southern economy was a wreck.  Slaves were no more.  In 1862 Lincoln had begun to free them.  On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and freed all Texas slaves.  That date is still celebrated as Emancipation Day, or “Juneteenth,” in many Texas communities.

    Besides the social and economic changes, people were just plain afraid and angry.  Northerners and their sympathizers thought the South should be punished.  Large numbers of the newly freed blacks wandered about, looking for jobs and safe homes.  That frightened many whites, and the resentment and anger built up.  Federal troops arrived in Texas to enforce the law and protect the freedmen, their presence an insult to the locals.  Most of the former Confederate soldiers who came home became responsible citizens again, but others, having grown too accustomed to war and its violence, were unable to adjust to civilian life.  Lawlessness became rampant.  Well-known bandits like the James and Younger brothers were among those Confederate soldiers who took to lives of crime after the war.  Others joined the Ku Klux Klan, a secret order meant to frighten the freedmen.  Others saw the opportunity to settle old scores.

    Collin County was not immune from any of these troubles, and became home to one of the fiercest of the many post-war feuds that erupted from California to Virginia.  It began with arguments over men having fought for opposing sides.  Both sides considered the others traitors unworthy of trust.  The Union League was formed to try to protect freed slaves and northern sympathizers, including some of the “carpetbaggers” who moved into the area to try to gain power and wealth off the defeated South.   They also looked for opportunities to punish ex-Confederates.

    Shortly after he had returned home to Collin County, a group of men from the league rode to Bob Lee’s house and arrested him for “crimes he had committed during the War.”  The men who arrested him included Lewis Peacock, Jim Maddox, Bill Smith, Sam Bier, Hardy Dial, Doc Wilson, and Israel Boren.  They said they would take him to Sherman, but long before they got there, the “arrest” turned into a common robbery.  Lee lost his gold watch, a twenty dollar gold piece, and his mule before he was released.  Lee filed a lawsuit against his attackers, and he and his family began to organize their own group to oppose the Union League.

    The following February Lee and Jim Maddox argued loudly inside a local store.  Maddox laughed Lee off at first, but when Lee turned to leave, Maddox pulled a pistol and fired.  The wound was serious but not fatal and Lee recovered in time.  Even so, there were cries for vengeance from all over the county.  Military records noted the murder attempt, but also indicated the army had no intention of doing anything about it, which made Lee’s friends and family even angrier.  But it was to get much worse.  While Lee recuperated at the home of Dr. W. H. Pierce of Pilot Grove, riders appeared and when the doctor stepped onto his porch to greet them, they shot and killed him.  The apparent shooter was Hugh Hudson.  The feud was on.

    During the course of 1868, Lige Clark, Billy Dixon, Dow Nance, Dan Sanders, Elijah Clark, and John Baldock all were killed.  Many others, including Lewis Peacock, were wounded.  Clark, a Peacock man, was shot by Dixon, a Lee follower, while the former attempted to court Dixon’s sister.  Dixon met his own end less than a month later on a cotton-hauling trip to Jefferson with a cousin.  Nance, Baldock, and Sanders were all gunned down by Lee men while attending a meeting in May.

    In August federal troops placed a $1,000 bounty on Lee’s head to anyone who would deliver the Collin County man to federal posts in either Marshall or Austin.  The reward was so enticing that even men who knew nothing of the feud, some from as far away as Kansas, came down to Collin County looking to collect the reward.  Three of these bounty hunters had the tables turned on them and ended up dead in early 1869.  Lee hardly breathed any easier though.  And in fact the military commander sent troops into the area to help bring Lee to “justice.”  A posse of soldiers and sheriff’s deputies arrived in McKinney from Sherman on March 28.  They attacked the house of Mexican War and Confederate veteran Colonel William Fitzhugh, finding no one.  Their quarry was found at another farm, however, and there the posse killed one of Lee’s supporters.   The next day the posse returned to Fitzhugh’s house at which a battle broke out and a deputy was killed and a soldier wounded.  A second Lee man was caught and killed a few weeks later.

    Within a few more weeks, Lee decided it wise to leave the area and hide out in Mexico.  But before he hardly got started on his trip, he was ambushed and killed, apparently betrayed by one of his own friends, Henry Boren.  The very next day, Boren’s own nephew, Bill, disgusted at Lee’s murder, calmly walked up to his uncle’s cabin and killed him in reprisal.  In July 1871 Peacock was gunned down outside his house as well.  Lee’s father was in turn murdered in 1877, after a brother and a Peacock man got into an ugly argument.  Such were the terrible times of post-Civil War North Texas.

* * *

    In February 1866 a Constitutional Convention was called to re-write the 1845 Texas Constitution.  Collin County voters elected James Throckmorton as their delegate.  The convention was divided into three factions – the old secessionists, the radical unionists, and the middle-of the-road conservatives.  Throckmorton, who had both opposed secession but fought for the South, was named chairman of the convention.  The new state constitution that resulted severely limited the rights of newly freed slaves, including refusing to grant them the right to vote.  The convention also opposed passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which ended slavery, and called for new state-wide elections in June.  That summer Throckmorton was elected governor over radical candidate Edwin M. Pease by a margin of 49,277 to 12,168.  President Andrew Johnson accepted the Texas government in August and Governor Throckmorton was inaugurated on August 9, 1866.

    Unfortunately for Confederate Texas and much of the South, the November federal elections changed everything.  Johnson remained president, but he lost all power when the Radical Republicans, who wanted the South harshly punished, assumed majorities in the U. S. House and Senate.  President Johnson was impeached, and Governor Throckmorton was removed from office on July 30, and like most former Confederate officials, he was denied the right to run for office in the future.  A new constitution was written in 1869, with many blacks and northern carpetbaggers participating.

    Reconstruction would not officially end in Texas until 1876, but in 1872 the General Amnesty Act allowed men like Throckmorton, who had returned to his law practice in McKinney, to serve in public offices again.  William Fitzhugh also received amnesty and served as doorkeeper for the Constitutional Convention of 1875, and as the Senate doorkeeper for the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Texas legislatures.   In 1874 Throckmorton was elected to Congress, and reelected in 1876.  Throckmorton concentrated his efforts on lobbying for education and federal support of railroad expansion.  The latter concern reflected the interests of his employer, the Texas and Pacific Railway Company, which retained Throckmorton as an attorney.  In 1878 Throckmorton again ran for governor but failed to receive the Democratic nomination.  He returned to Congress in 1884 and 1886, but due to poor health, he decided not to run in 1888.  He retired from politics and returned to McKinney, where he was the receiver for the Choctaw Coal and Railroad Company.  In March 1894, while traveling, Throckmorton suffered serious injuries from a fall.  He died at McKinney on April 21.  The citizens of McKinney erected a statue in his honor that carried the inscription, “A Tennesseean by Birth, a Texan by Adoption.”

Having survived two wars, William Fitzhugh’s end came in a surprisingly similar way.  On October 23, 1883, having survived the Lee-Peacock feud, he was killed when he was thrown from a wagon.  He was first buried in Forest Grove Cemetery near McKinney but was subsequently re-interred in Fairview Cemetery in Denison.  He was survived by seven children.

* * *

    During the white man’s Civil War, various Indian tribes and bands joined the opposing sides, neither of which expressed any appreciation after the war was over.  By 1874, the Comanches, Cheyennes, and Kiowas, under the leadership of Quanah Parker, Lone Wolf, and the prophet Isa-tai led the last of the hostile Indians left in Texas.  They were defeated at the Battle of Adobe Walls, and later in fighting on the Red River, between the Washita River and Sweetwater Creek, and on McClellan’s Creek.  General Ranald Mackenzie administered another major blow to Indian resistance when he attacked and scattered the Cheyennes in Palo Duro and Tule Canyons, killing many of their horses.

This 1874 Red River War spelled the doom of the Plains Indians of Texas.  With their horses and equipment lost so that hunting was impossible, and with winter rapidly approaching, the leading chiefs of the warring tribes surrendered unconditionally.  The final holdouts, the Quahadi band of the Comanche, surrendered in June 1875.  The Indian presence in Texas was thus ended.  Only the Alabama Coushatta remained on a small reservation in East Texas, plus a handful of Tiguas in El Paso, whose reservation would not be recognized by the government until the 1960s.

RAILROADS

    The next phase of major settlement in Collin County occurred during and after the arrival of the railroads.  For the first thirty years of the county’s history farmers had little incentive to take advantage of the fertile soil of the Blackland Prairie, considered one of the richest agricultural regions of Texas.  Between 1840 and 1870 the lack of dependable, fast transportation facilities limited markets, and the absence of mechanized farm equipment greatly restricted agricultural production.  Throughout this period farming was the most common occupation in Collin, and even those who had other occupations usually farmed at least a little.  But large farms were almost unheard of because there was simply no need to grow more than could be consumed locally.  Even so, the population of the county did manage to reach 14,013 in 1870, and land values approached $5.75 per acre two years later.  The 1870 Manufacturers Census showed that the Fitzhugh Mill, still practically the only industry in the county, continued its historical success.  The “burr” mill was powered by an eighteen horsepower steam engine, and two men and two women were employed there.  The maximum capacity of the mill was 150 bushels per day.  In the year ending June 1870, the mill ground 3,300 bushels of corn meal, valued at $2,200.  Another 65,000 pounds of flour, valued at $4,800, was ground during the same period.

    But the arrival of the railroad after the Civil War began to change things.  By 1872, Robert Fitzhugh was dead, and with the first railroad in the county opening that year, his mill quickly fell prey to easier transportation and new competition from larger mills built in McKinney and the new railroad towns.  In 1870, though all of the main cattle trails had moved farther west, the Preston Road was still the most important route for immigrant and freighter traffic in north central Texas.  But like everything else, that would soon change too.  Other wagon and stagecoach roads headed south to Dallas and Austin, and southeast to Rockwall, Tyler, Jefferson, and Marshall.

    When the railroads removed obstacles to large scale farming, the population grew quickly, and a fifty-year period of economic expansion began for Collin County.  In 1872 the first railroad bridge was built over the Red River by the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad at Denison and the old wagon roads almost overnight lost their importance.  In that same year the Houston and Texas Central Railway became the first to reach the county.  The Texas Central came up north from Houston and passed through McKinney on its way to the Red River.  The settlements established before the construction of rail lines seldom survived if the railroads bypassed them, but those that were fortunate to receive a railroad crossing or stop usually grew dramatically, at least by the standard of the day.  The railroad was so important that the towns of Richardson and Plano actually picked up and moved to the new tracks.  Plano was originally farther northeast, but moved many miles to get where it is today.  Plano changed its name too, from the original Foreman to Fillmore, in honor of President Millard Fillmore, and finally to Plano.   The towns of Melissa, Anna, and Van Alstyne were created by the railroad, and the city of Allen Station was established by the Texas Central’s purchasing agent in 1870 as a railroad watering station.  It was named in 1872 for Ebenezer Allen, former attorney general of Texas and a promoter of the railroad.  In 1876 a post office opened there. 

    In 1878 the still new Allen Station became famous due to a visit from a very infamous outlaw.  It is said that Sam Bass grew tired of robbing stagecoaches, believing he was profiting far too little for his “hard work.”  And so, in his own unique way, Bass decided that just like the farmers everywhere around him, he too should profit from the new railroads.  Allen Station appeared to be the perfect spot to try his new business experiment.  Bass and his gang, including local Tom Spotswood, rode into town on a cold, wet February night.  There were very few people around in good weather, but the blistery winter wind left the station deserted.  When the train pulled up and stopped, Frank Jackson and Sebe Barnes leaped into the engine car with drawn pistols and held the engineer and fireman under guard while Bass and Spotswood boarded the express car.  The February 23 Galveston News reported:

Train No. 4 of the Texas Central road left Denison one hour late yesterday evening, reaching Allen Station, in Collin County, eight miles south of McKinney, where it was stopped, and pistol shots were heard from the direction of the car assigned to and used by the Texas Express Company, which on investigation was found to be surrounded by six armed and masked men, who, finding the express messenger, James Thomas had fastened the door from the inside, cut the car loose from the train and moved it, or made the engineer move it, several car lengths from the rest of the train, and then threatened if the messenger did not open the door they would burn it with its contents, himself included.  This threat caused Thomas to open the door, when the robbers entered and took all the money and left, without disturbing or molesting any other portion of the train.

    It was fortunate for the railroad Bass did not come along a few hours earlier, when a pay train had passed carrying much more money than the one that was robbed.  The express messenger apparently made a fight of it, hiding among some boxes and keeping his attackers at bay by firing his pistol until he ran out of ammunition.  He even managed to wound one of the robbers before giving up.  According to the newspaper report, estimates of “…the amount of money taken by the robbers place the sum all the way from $1,500 to $2,000.”  The robbers claimed they got only $1,280 from Texas’s first train robbery, and also said there were only four of them, not six.  They also denied anyone was hurt.  Tom Spotswood foolishly returned home and was arrested in Pilot Point by a deputy sheriff and placed in jail in lieu of a $2,500 bond.  He was later convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison.

    Bass went on to become both a famous and a dead outlaw.  It was said that he had a hideout in Fairview, but that is almost certainly a myth.  On the other hand, some evidence suggests that outlaw James “Jim” Reed, a husband of the infamous Belle Starr (from Scyene in eastern Dallas County), may have been involved in a shootout in Fairview.  Today’s Goodman house on Stacy Road was originally built and owned by John A. and Lucinda Wetsel Taylor.  By the 1870s the house was owned by John T. Morris and his wife Eliza June (who was a daughter of Peter Fisher).  Taylor was a distant relative of Reed’s, who in April 1874 robbed a stage near San Marcos.  On May 23, lawmen, acting on information that Reed was hiding in Taylor’s house crept in under cover of darkness in hopes of making an arrest.  Sadly, the lawmen became confused and shot at each other, with one killed and another wounded.  Reed was actually camped in the woods, heard the confused gunfire, and escaped without a shot being fire in his direction.  Morris was later deputized and arrested Reed himself.  Reed was subsequently hanged near Paris.

    In 1875, James Wetsel bought the farm and house, and it was purchased by the Goodman family in 1950.  It has been extensively remodeled and expanded since, but the core of today’s Goodman home is very possibly the oldest structure remaining in Fairview.

    By 1884 Allen already had a population estimated at 350, three churches, a school, a chair factory, and a flour mill.

    After the Texas Central, the next railroad in Collin County was the East Line & Red River, also known as the Sherman, Shreveport, & Southern.  It reached McKinney in 1886. It went from Jefferson to McKinney, through Farmersville and Lowry Crossing, and created the town of Princeton.  This railroad took the place of a trade route that had run to Jefferson along a sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy, and always dangerous wagon track from Collin County since the 1840s.  The railroad was discontinued in 1941 just before World War II began.

    The Missouri, Kansas & Texas, or “Katy” Railroad also came in 1886 and was almost immediately joined in 1886-87 by the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway.  It entered the county from the southwest, going through Clear Lake and Copeville, and exited at Farmersville.  The town of Nickelville moved to the tracks and changed its name to Wylie.  The town of Sachse was formally established in that same year when William Sachse donated land for the right-of-way to the GC & Santa Fe in exchange for naming the station Sachse.  The town got a post office too, with the registered name of Saxie.  (The name’s spelling was corrected in 1892.)  The St. Louis Southwestern, better known as the Cotton Belt, came through Collin in 1887.  The towns of Renner, Murphy, and Josephine were created by it, and Nevada (named for the Nevada Territory in which large deposits of silver had been discovered) moved to its tracks.  The Cotton Belt also went through, Plano, Wylie, and Lavon on its way to Tyler and beyond.  Farmers needed to get their products to market, and finished goods needed to be shipped to farmers.  There were no cars or trucks, and wagon roads were still poor and wholly unreliable.  But by the mid-1890s six railroads crisscrossed the county, connecting farmers to retail markets throughout Texas.

    With an outlet for their products, farmers began to cultivate the unplowed fertile land in the eastern and central sections of the county like never before.  Between 1870 and 1920 both the number of farms and crop production increased dramatically.  In 1870, 903 farms valued at just over three million dollars produced 674,565 bushels of corn, 4,371 bales of cotton, and 42,827 bushels of wheat.  More farmers came, and more railroads were built.  The St. Louis San Francisco & Texas, usually called simply the “Frisco,” came through Collin County in 1902, creating the towns of Prosper and Frisco.  Celina moved to its tracks.  The Greenville Northwestern was part of the Greenville-Whitewright Northern Traction Company.  It was supposed to go from Greenville to Gainesville, but the section from Anna to Blue Ridge, opened in 1914 through Westminster, was all that was ever constructed.   It went broke and was gone by 1920.  It was one of few failures, though.  In that same year the number of farms had increased to 6,001, with a value estimated at well over $84 million.  Production of corn had increased to 2.57 million bushels, cotton to 49,311 bales, and wheat to over 950,000 bushels.

PROGRESS

   

    The county’s first newspaper of which there is any record was started in 1858.  The McKinney Messenger closed in 1874.

    The county’s first phone exchange was opened in McKinney on October 20, 1883.

    In 1900, the population of Collin County had risen to 50,087.  Forest Grove had its own post office, with John P. Snider and James B. Faulkner serving as postmasters.  Gabriel Fitzhugh’s sons, George and Walter, ran a store there.  But in 1900 they sold it to Lloyd Garrett who built a new store on a knoll overlooking the creek.

    In 1911 Anson Cole bought the right to re-build the important Fitzhugh Mill at its old site at Fitzhugh Mill.  The Farmers Gin Company of Fitzhugh Mills closed in 1923.  In 2005, Fairview resident Lindy Fisher led an archaeological dig at the Fitzhugh mill site and uncovered a number of artifacts, which were subsequently displayed at Collin County Community College.

* * *

    The next great life-changing invention after the railroad was the automobile.  Only a few were produced before World War I began in August 1914, but by war’s end in November 1918 (the U. S. joined the war in April 1917), everything had changed.  Trucks, cars, and highways all became important as the economy boomed and Americans had more free time than ever before.  By the time the Roaring Twenties really began to roar, twenty-three different Collin County communities had voted road bonds that totaled nearly $4 million.  The old dirt wagon tracks were soon gone.  New roads, combined with State Highway 289 (Old Preston Road), provided county residents with easy access to Dallas, Fort Worth, and Waco.  One of the big catalysts for the new roadways, at least in North Texas, was the 1910 Glidden Tour, an endurance contest in which automobiles competed over long distances.  In that year, the tour’s route went from Cincinnati to Chicago – by way of Dallas, Texas.  The tour’s participants entered the state at Texarkana, traveled southwest to Bonham and McKinney, and then south to Dallas, following the old dirt stage line roads.  It was the first glimpse most locals had of an automobile.  But the impact would be significant.

    Between 1911 and 1925 private automobile associations were formed to build and promote cross-country highways.  These new paved roads were called Named Highways or Auto Trails, and were often sponsored by local chambers of commerce, auto enthusiasts, and businesses that saw the improved roads as a cheaper alternative to the railroads for shipping goods.  The first of the auto trails that crossed North Texas followed the old Fisher and Sawyer stage line through Fairview, running from McKinney through Sloan’s Grove to Wetsel and Allen.  It was known as the King of Trails, and was marked by a yellow, rectangular road sign with the letters KT in black.  The new highway ran from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Brownsville, Texas, and so was also known as the Pathway Joining Nations.  Locally, the road was called the Exall Memorial Highway, in honor of Colonel Henry Exall, a North Texas land developer and area promoter, who had also served as chair of the Texas State Democratic Executive Committee from 1886-88.  Work began in Collin County on the Exall Highway in January 1920, and was completed in 1921.  A later highway, the Kansas-Oklahoma-Texas & Gulf Highway followed the same route through Collin County on its way to Waco from Herrington, Kansas.

    According to the 1920 decennial census McKinney had grown to 6,677 residents, while the county’s population was down to 49,609, more and more of whom were beginning to move off the farm and into the towns and cities.  In 1923, the average taxable value of land per acre had risen to at least $25 and ranged as high as $50.  By 1930 thirteen towns had electricity, natural gas, and even a telephone exchange.  Three had populations of over 1,000 people.

* * *

    In 1915, the Bush homestead lay along Sloan Creek, just south of today’s Highway 5 railroad underpass.  Edgar H. Bush decided to erect a dam across the deep creek on the west end of his farm.  The lake that resulted was originally built for the Bush children, but the public soon discovered it and by popular demand Bush opened the lake to swimming for a small fee.  According to Bush, “In 1924 I built a concrete dam on [the northern fork of] Sloan Creek that ran through our farm.  This swimming pool, which we called Bush Springs, was fed by cool spring water.  People from surrounding towns as well as McKinney enjoyed swimming and having picnics there.”  In time the swimming spot even featured a bath house for changing into “bathing costumes”, electric lights, parking for automobiles that came on Bush Road from the Exall Highway, slides, and diving boards, and became so popular that the Interurban rail line later added a stop, allowing riders to detrain there.  This stop may also have been called the Shain and/or Franklin stop.  Every few weeks, the water would be drained out by opening the flood gates so that Ed Beard could clean the surface with large brushes.  A spring rain “several years later” caused the creek to rise by 25 feet and wash away the slides, diving boards, and dam.

    The Interurban, officially the Texas Traction Company, itself began operation in 1908.  The sixty-five mile railway ran south from Sherman to Dallas, paralleling the Fisher and Sawyer stage road through Fairview.  In 1917 it was expanded to run from Denison all the way to Waco.  Unlike the typical steam-driven trains, the Interurban was electrically driven, and could occasionally be waved down by passengers.  There were regular stops at Plano and McKinney.

    Another dam was built by a group of businessmen from McKinney.  Club Lake was a private affair for members only, built on the property of Nelson Bush.  A third dam was built on the north side of the highway underpass on Edgar Bush’s land.  This dam created Bush Springs, a smaller but very popular spot for public swimming.

    Remnants of the old lakes and Interurban line remain today.  Two old arch bridges, part of a dam, and a large brick cistern are hidden in the wooded area between SH 5 and US 75.  The old railroad tracks are inactive today, but are owned by DART, which plans to add light or commuter rail to Fairview at some point in the future.  A number of artifacts have also been uncovered in the area.

* * *

    The 1930s were just as horrible as the 1920s had been good.  The Great Depression shattered the economy, and millions were left jobless and many of those hungry and homeless.  For American farmers, the depression really began even sooner than the October 1929 stock market crash.  The crash only made things worse for them.  And nearly ninety years after the first whites came to Collin County the number one source of employment was still farming, so the county was very hard hit.  In fact, things were so bad, the county’s population continued to decline until the mid-1960s.  The number of county farms also dropped, from 6,069 in 1930 to 4,771 by 1940.  The value of crops harvested plummeted from over $10 million to barely more than $6.5 million during the same period.  Much of what was grown was cotton, at an average of about ½ of a 500 pound bale to the acre.  Bales were compressed in McKinney at a compress on Throckmorton Street.  As late as 1940 Collin County's unemployment rate still stood at 19 percent.  The average value of farmland per acre was $58.91.

    Corn was another common crop, and families supplemented their food supplies by hunting rabbit, dove, possum, coon, deer, and squirrel.  Those animals and others, including even skunks, were also hunted for their hides.  The hides in turn could be sold or bartered for other products, including store goods and ice.  In the day before refrigerators, it was the lucky inhabitant of Collin County who had an ice box.  Ice wagons drove down the dirt roads from the ice house in McKinney, delivering blocks of ice that kept the boxes and their contents cold for anywhere between three days to a week.  Most farm families had their own cows and hogs too, the former for milk and butter, the latter to be slaughtered each autumn for meat.  Of course chickens were also found on most farms, for eggs and frying.

    During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress created many agencies to try to once again get the economy rolling and get the unemployed back to work.  New Deal legislation included creation of the National Recovery Administration, (NRA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), Public Works Administration (PWA), the Civilian Conser-vation Corps (CCC), and many more.  The latter agency operated an office out of Allen, offering young men the chance to work for $1.00 a day.  Some people, of course, like during the difficult years after the Civil War, tried to take the easy way out.  One local man recalled that in about 1930 or 1931, he used his team of horses to help a young couple get their car out of the mud on FM 1378.  Due to a subsequent newspaper story, he later came to believe he had unwittingly helped the infamous gangsters, Bonnie and Clyde.

    One bright spot, both figuratively and literally, was the creation of the Grayson-Collin Electric Co-operative in 1937.  GCEC resulted from another of Roosevelt’s many New Deal agencies, the Rural Electrification Administration.  The REA’s mission was to bring electricity to the isolated communities and farms across the country, and many farmers received their first electricity as a result of its work.  Nearly seventy years later, GCEC still serves parts of Fairview with electricity.

    Despite the depression, however, new roads continued to be built, at a never before seen rate, helping local farmers get to their markets.  The old auto trails were forced out of business during the depression and were replaced by state highways, which were given numerical designations.  The Exall Memorial Highway was improved in 1936 (the year of the Texas Centennial and the opening of State Fair Park in Dallas) and re-dubbed Texas State Highway 75.  A big celebration was held in McKinney upon the opening of the paved road, which included today’s Greenville and Jupiter Roads.  Today’s Frisco Road was also a paved state highway (TX 24, and later FM 720 when the TX 24 designation was apparently given to the McKinney to Denton highway), to Frisco.  FM 1378, however, the old McKinney-Rockwall Road, remained unpaved.

* * *

    On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland and World War II officially began.  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory and thus the United States entered the war against Japan and their allies – Germany, Italy, Finland, Bulgaria, and Romania.  The Great Depression quickly evaporated as the country mobilized to fight.  During the war many basic goods such as coffee, sugar, gas, and rubber tires were rationed.  Farmers could get a higher allotment of gas for farm equipment, but if a car or truck owner ran out of ration stamps, he simply had to await his next allotment.  There were shortages of antifreeze, too, and copper and other metals were exceedingly rare due to war needs.  As a result, some drivers used alcohol in their radiators, and electricity became increasingly unreliable.  Kids were encouraged to participate in metal drives, and even saved foil gum wrappers.  With so many men, and a few women, off to the war, there were local shortages of laborers too, so prisoners of war from a POW camp near Princeton were sometimes used to help with farm work.  Ashburn Army Hospital was opened in nearby McKinney, along with another small camp for German prisoners on the hospital grounds.  Millions of Americans served during the war; about 300,000 died before it ended in September 1945 with Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship Missouri.

* * *

    On March 2, 1945 the federal Rivers and Harbors Act authorized construction of the Lavon Dam and Reservoir.  The next year the Collin County Soil Conservation District was formed, and planned the construction of 144 flood-retarding structures, including Lake Lavon, to prevent the flooding of thousands of acres of rich bottomland in southeastern Collin County.   Construction on the new Lavon dam began in January 1948.

    In 1946 the county had a total of 138 miles of paved roads.  Allen’s population was down to just over 400, reflecting the continuing population decline in the county.  Partly as a result of the better roads and more cars, but also partly due to the population decrease, the Texas Electric railway (formerly the Texas Traction Company) discontinued service to Allen on December 31, 1948, after thirty years.  Thus ended the last segment of the Interurban line, which had expanded over the years to more than 200 miles of track.

    Lucas was up to 100 people, with two stores, a gin, a school, a public softball field, and two churches – Baptist and Disciples of Christ.

    Production of wheat, the county's primary cash crop, rose from 352,229 bushels in 1949 to 1.225 million bushels in 1959.  The average value of land in 1954 was $145.52 per acre.

    In 1952 the Rockwall-McKinney Road was finally rocked.  In 1953, the Lavon Dam was completed.  The finished product was 9,540 feet long, and ninety feet above the original streambed.  In 1956 a new paved farm-to-market highway from McKinney to Wylie (FM 1378) finally replaced the old Rockwall-McKinney Road.  Lucas Branch Road across the lake to Branch began construction that same year.  John T. Shipp and Curtis Reeder were credited with construction of that new paved road.  Most every other road was still dirt, even then.  When Lavon Reservoir (later Lake Lavon) was being built, the Army Corps of Engineers erected a tower near the Lucas school to help with the surveying.  The tower naturally became a favorite climbing spot for students.  In 1957 the new Texas Highway Commission awarded a contract to construct 13.5 miles of limited access highway running from Campbell Road north to a point about 4.5 miles south of McKinney, and parallel to and about one mile west of the old (Exall) Highway 75.  The cost of the project was $2.5 million.  The old highway was re-designated as Texas State Highway 5, its name today.  The new highway is today’s US 75, or North Central Expressway.

    Mechanization of farming and the accompanying growth of cities and industry after World War II reduced the number of farms in Collin County from 3,166 in 1950 to only 2,001 in 1960.  The population of the county also dropped, to 41,962, nearly 10,000 less than in 1900.

    The percentage of farms operated by tenants had peaked in 1925 at 74 percent.  But by 1960, the percentage was only 38, a much smaller portion of many fewer farms.  The county’s population continued to drop too, down to 41,247.

SCHOOLS

Records indicate that John M. McKinney was baptized into the Church of Christ and later built a small box house on his land on the Rockwall Road (today’s FM 1378) where the road turns sharply east.  This was probably the McKinney School House, the first known school in the area, predating even the Willow Springs School.  Like almost all schools at the time, Willow Springs, opened during the Civil War in 1864, was a private one.  It was located near the present-day intersection of Estelle Lane and Gold Dust Lane in Lucas.  Teachers included the Reverend King, a Christian minister, and Professors Gentry, Stewart and Collier.  Among the students listed were members of the Fitzhugh, Snider, Cook, Sneed, Spurgin, McKinney, Biggs, McMillan, Coffey, and Williams families.  Trustees for the school were J.M. McKinney, R.S. Sneed, and William Coffey.  The Willow Springs community got its name, not surprisingly, from a local spring surrounded by a stand of willow trees.

According to an article entitled “Willow Springs School Educated Kids in the Late 1800s,” written by Gwendyn Pettit for the Allen American, “On May 27, 1874, John and Martha A. Spurgin sold for a token $1, three acres of land to J. M. McKinney, Aaron Snider, and Jacob Faulkner, trustees of School District No. 20.  This acreage is located on the east end of Estelle Lane, one half mile north of Strain’s store building.  At this site, a strong spring flowed out beneath a grove of willow trees.”

In 1884, Willow Springs became a public school and its name may have at that time been officially changed to the Lucas Public School.  The Lucas community was named after Gabriel H. Lucas, son of early settler Peter F. Lucas.  Gabriel opened a store there on the Rockwall Road in 1870 and it appears that the Willow Springs name gradually gave way to Lucas.  That gradual name change was accelerated when in May 1888 a new post office was opened inside the store and not surprisingly was named for Gabe Lucas.  Lucas was also named the community’s first postmaster.  It was common for such rural communities to be recognized by the names of known churches, schools, or stores, but when a post office was created, the town’s name almost always followed, since that was how mail was addressed.

In 1905, because of constant mud and the many creeks the schoolchildren had to cross, the entire schoolhouse was moved by a team of horses to a higher spot on land donated by J. E. Stratton and Noah Cox.  The new site was next to the old Lucas water tower, across from the Strain Store, and near the Morrows Store.  Cox and his wife Sarah also gave a half-acre for the Lucas Christian Church adjoining the school.  In 1912 they tore it down and built a larger two story building for the Lucas School.  This school remained as a central part of the Lucas community for many years.

Although the school had moved and become public, it was still known to most locals as Willow Springs.  The fact that the Lucas Post Office was discontinued on September 30, 1903 probably helped keep the Willow Springs name alive, and it seems almost puzzling that the name change became permanent over time.  In fact, according to former teacher Clarence L. Horton of Farmersville, the school was still called Willow Springs when he went there in 1922.  But before he moved out of Lucas in 1936, the name had been finally changed to the Lucas School.  Even so, as late as the 1940s some folks still referred to the Lucas children as Willow Springs kids.  However and whenever the name changed from Willow Springs to Lucas, a generation of children was educated there during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the next.

Lucas School, 1936

* * *

The Lick Springs School was established in 1871 about five miles southeast of McKinney on the north side of Sloan Creek, near where it crossed the Old Rockwall-McKinney Road, on a hill east of the road and near the Watkins property.  At least one source claimed the school was at the northeast corner of today’s FM 1378 and Camino Real.  Most of the land along Sloan Creek there belonged to R. C. and Vera Strickland, who gave the land for the Lick Springs school.  Another resident of the area was Claude Cecil Martin, a school master from East Tennessee.  His father, George W. Martin, thought the area around Weston, where the family first moved from Tennessee, was too flat, so they moved to a site on Sloan Creek.  The site was described as being on a white rock hill north of Wetsel (Stacy) Road and east of Rockwall (FM 1378) Road that gave a wide view from his front porch.  The younger Martin was a school teacher at Lick Springs.  The area and school got their name from the springs that fed into the creek.  These springs contained large deposits of salt, quite unusual in this area, and became the site for wild animals – especially deer and buffalo – to find and eat salt.  Over the years, the salt licks were visited so often that large holes formed in the creek banks where the animals would go deeper and deeper for the life-sustaining nutrient.  Some holes were said to be as large as “a half-bushel measure and as deep as a deer could reach.”  The animal-made holes could be three to four feet deep, rubbed perfectly smooth on the inside by the heads and shoulders of the wild animals as they leaned in for a lick of salt.  The closest large salt deposit at the time was in Grand Saline, to which nineteenth century settlers, who needed salt to protect meat in the days before refrigeration, would travel to trade for it.  The old school building was a windowless log house about fourteen feet square.  There was no school in the winter because there was no fireplace in which to build a fire.  A Mr. Warren was an early teacher.  This original log house was later replaced by a building made of boxing planks.

The Forest Grove community was first settled in about 1858 on White Rock Creek, though one source suggests that the name goes back as far as 1845.  Forest Grove School was established in 1884, by a July order of the Collin County Commissioner’s Court.  It was near the location of the later Forest Grove Church.  In History of Lucas School, Mrs. John Shipp added “James M. Snider, husband of Sarah Jane Fitzhugh Snider, gave a plot northwest of the Forest Grove church lot for the … Forest Grove School.  A few miles northeast of the new Forest Grove School was one called Lick Springs School.”

    There were other schools too, most with shorter histories.  The Wetsel Community School, which existed from around 1860, was at the southwest corner of today’s Stacy Road and State Highway 5.  This school later merged with Allen.  The Wetsel community itself included much of what is today southwestern Fairview.  C. C. Martin taught at Wetsel for a time, and his daughter Evelyn was born in the teacherage at Stacy Road and SH 5.  Martin also taught at Lick Springs, where his family lived.  Another teacher at the Wetsel school was Donnie Barksdale.  She married and took a few years off to have a baby, returning as Donnie Williams.

    The Winningkoff School was located in the Winningkoff community in northeastern Lucas, near Orr Road.  The school started in 1884 when A. J. Winningkoff, who owned 204 acres out of the Calvin Boales’ survey, “in consideration of the imperative public want of a school and church building” donated two acres to the county.  Across the road was the home of Dr. Rufus E. Morrow.  His home was a two-story white house across from Taylor’s Grocery, operated by B. A. “Curley” and Bessie Taylor, with a pharmacy and barbershop inside.  Ed Knight also ran a local grocery.  Another prominent Winningkoff resident was Aaron Norman, a blacksmith who operated an important shop behind his house.  Winningkoff also was the original home of the Blythe Chapel Methodist Church, named for Dr. Ellsworth S. Blythe, who donated the original church site in 1895.  This church was later moved to Lucas where it became the First Methodist Church in 1967.  The school closed in 1949, the building moved to Melissa for use as a house.

The Stinson family gave land for the Stinson School, which was oddly enough nicknamed “Who’d-A-Thought-It,” to the south near Stinson Road and Parker Road.   Another oddly named local institution was the Faulkner School, also called “Hogwallow School.”  Hogwallow was located on the creek just south of today’s Bethany Road.   Two other area communities were Lazy Neck and Engleman, the latter named for J. B. Engleman.  However, neither of these communities appears to have had its own school.

    As roads improved and cars and trucks became more common, children could travel farther to school.  Also, rural populations declined as more and more people moved to the city, and of course for a time the entire county population declined.  As a result, fewer and fewer students attended the small scattered country schools and these once important community institutions began to disappear.  In the early 1900s local residents and supporters of the Lick Springs and Forest Grove Schools began to have serious discussions about possibly merging.  As a result of these discussions, thirty-six property owners from Forrest Grove and another twenty-one from Lick Springs signed a petition requesting consolidation.  The petition was presented to Collin County officials by J. G. Martin of Forest Grove, whose brother C. C. had taught at both Wetsel and Lick Springs, and C. B. Watson of Lick Springs.  On July 2, 1917, the Lovejoy Consolidated Common School District, Number 32, was established.   The new district initially encompassed 10.39 square miles, and was named for Mrs. J. L. Lovejoy, an active clubwoman of the day and the grandmother of Wilkins and Lovejoy Comegys, prominent businessmen in McKinney.  Mrs. Lovejoy took an active interest in the school, donated many books to its library (as she had to many area schools over the years), and left the school $1,000.

Lovejoy School, May 1921

    Both before and after the consolidation, many locals informally referred to the school as Orchard Gap instead of Lovjoy.  This name came from the Old Orchard Gap Primitive Baptist Church, which was linked to many of the original families at Forest Grove.   The church was founded in 1853 by Elders Hiram Savage, J. E. Deatherage, John Sneede and Mark Allen, and included Peter F. Lucas, G. Fitzhugh, T. B. Martin, Francis Fitzhugh, Elizabeth Fitzhugh, Amanda Fisher, Catherine Fitzhugh and W. S. Fisher among its members.  As a result of the church’s influence, its name was sometimes used to describe the area surrounding it.  One of the few written accounts of the name being used in lieu of Forest Grove is the obituary of James C. Lowery.  Lowery was the namesake of Lowery Crossing, and according to his obituary he had “taught at Orchard Gap near Forest Grove” sometime before the Civil War.

    The new Lovejoy district bought four acres from the Fitzhugh family, about midway between the two old schools.  The initial wood frame “little red schoolhouse” contained only four classrooms for grades 1 to 9, and was originally white.  Sheds outside held horses.  By 1932, Lovejoy School had 100 students in nine grades.  The first grade teacher was Mrs. Bidell.  Its one building was divided into four large rooms heated by a large central coal-burning stove.  Light came initially from coal oil lamps, but later from white gas fixtures.  There were three grades each in three of the rooms, so older kids were encouraged to help their younger classmates.  One student, Doyle Hendricks, would later recall being paid a nickel to go down to the school early every morning and get the fire in the stove started so that on cold winter days the building would be warm when the other students arrived.

* * *

    In 1944, Lucas School was still housed in the big two-story building built in 1912 on the south side of the Rockwall Road between the First Christian Church and Dave Morrow’s store.  Similar to its counterpart in Lovejoy, the Lucas school had four large rooms downstairs.  The front rooms were used for classrooms, the southeast room was a kitchen, and the southwest room was a playroom with a drinking fountain.  Each classroom had two large closets, one the cloakroom and the other the book room.  The stationary desks were set in rows, one for each grade.  Most of the children went barefoot when the weather was warm.  There was a trophy case located on the wall between the book room and the cloakroom in the northeast or “big” room.  The classrooms were heated by large potbellied coal stoves.  Out back was a coal bin and also two restrooms, one each for the boys and the girls.  On the second floor of the Lucas School were an auditorium with a stage and two large closets.  The Woodmen of the World, also called the “Wobblies” used to meet here on a regular basis, and used the closets for their storage.  The Wobblies were a combination insurance group, fraternal organization, and political group.   There was even a sign on the upper part of the building that said W.O.W.

Lucas School House

Across the increasingly busy Rockwall-McKinney Road from the school was the “teacherage.”  This house was built in the 1920s by local residents on a half-acre of land donated by Mr. and Mrs. R. B. Spurgin.  People donated the funds and labor for the construction, including a number of residents who did not have children in the school.  The total cost was $631.50, including $35 for labor and the rest for materials.  A carpenter worked at half-price to oversee the carpentry, and another man was hired to oversee the paper hanging.  Everything else was donated.  The Woman’s Home Demonstration Club gave $25, which they had won on their canning exhibit at the Collin County Fair, and which paid for a piano and the drinking fountain.  Mr. And Mrs. Clarence Horton were the first occupants of the teacherage, which even included a garage, a rare feature in those days.

    Estelle Heifner was a later teacher and principal.  She too lived in the teacherage for a time, with her parents and brother.  Estelle Spurgin later taught the upper grades and became principal.  She also served as the school’s janitor, and among her many duties she made sure the stoves were lit and the rooms were clean each morning.  The coal stoves were later replaced with large butane heaters, and a ping-pong table was added to the playroom.  Spurgin brought back library books every two weeks or so from the county superintendent’s office.  Periodically the county’s school nurse would make her rounds to check on general health and nutrition, as well as vaccines.

    Elizabeth Biggs, who lived with her parents, Shorty and Haley Biggs, on the corner beside the Baptist Church, played the piano for the school’s music classes.  Her father ran one of the two stores in Lucas.  West of his store was the Lucas Gin.  There was also a nearby blacksmith shop operated by J. P. Dotson.  Elizabeth Biggs taught at Lucas until she married Wayne Hendricks, who later become Plano’s superintendent.  After Elizabeth Biggs Hendricks married, Inez Smithey took her place as a Lucas School teacher.  During the 1950s another of Lucas’s teachers was Deliah “Miss Dee” Moore, who lived in the teacherage.

* * *

    The Wetsel School closed in 1940 and the Winningkoff School in 1949.  Its one teacher tried to recruit Indians to come to the school in a desperate effort to get enough students enrolled to save it.  Of course the only Indians in Collin County in the last ninety years were transient workers, usually farm laborers.  That left only the Lucas and Lovejoy schools of the many little country schools that had once dotted the immediate area.  A natural rivalry developed between the schools, and students would later recall spirited basketball and baseball games between the two schools, as well as with some of the few other remaining country schools like Parker and Murphy.  It was said that local farmers would stop whatever they were doing to see the games, parking their trucks and wagons up and down the road, so they could root for their favorite team.  Lights were even added to the Lucas field so they could play baseball at night.  One student recalled that everyone knew when the lights at the ball field came on, because the lights at some of the area houses would dim from the strain on the early electrical system.  Jimmy Heifner, Estelle’s brother, was one of the coaches of the Lucas ball team.  Frank GoForth was another.

Local Sports Teams

Like Lovejoy, Lucas initially had only nine grades, sending its high school aged students to Plano or McKinney, but in later years added two more grades.  Prior to 1939, Texas high schools only went through the eleventh grade.  But in that year, state law changed and school age children that started in 1939 had to go a full twelve years.  Students who started school before 1939 but graduated thereafter were usually allowed to skip a grade, thus there were twelve grades, but those “in-between” students only went eleven of twelve years.  This state-wide practice was followed in Lucas and Lovejoy when students in the eighth grade skipped directly into the tenth.

    Many rural schools started their terms early in August and then closed a few weeks in autumn for harvesting crops like cotton, and then resuming again until spring planting.  Lucas is supposed to not have taken this fall break, at least not during the late 1940s.

    On Sunday afternoon, April 27, 1958, a tornado struck Lovejoy.  The roof of the school was blown off and major damage resulted from the wind, rain, and hail.  There was talk of discontinuing the school altogether and merging with Lucas.  After all, there were not that many students at the school to begin with, and after the school was so badly damaged, the Lovejoy students had to go to Lucas at least temporarily anyway.  But the school had a powerful identity in the community, so it was decided by a determined majority that the facility would be rebuilt.  When repairs were complete the building included a new cafeteria/auditorium and, for the first time, indoor restrooms.  The school’s bell had been rescued from a ditch after the tornado, and was returned to the building to again ring in classes after repairs were complete.

    By 1958, both Lucas and Lovejoy Schools had so few students that, like the old country schools before them, they too were in danger of closing.  In 1958, after the tornado repairs were complete, Lucas not only returned the Lovejoy students, but also sent its own, to Lovejoy.  In 1963 it was decided to permanently and officially close the now dormant Lucas School.  Thus, as had been done back in 1917, they voted to consolidate.  The Lovejoy Common School District thus expanded to seventeen square miles.  Lovejoy had the better building at the time, so it was chosen to be the single area school.  Even with the consolidation, however, the population was so small that there were only two teachers in the entire school and about thirty students in grades 1 through 6.  Mrs. Billy McDonald, who came to Lovejoy in 1950, instructed those students.  The other teacher was Mrs. Estelle Spurgin.  A third teacher was added in 1965 or 1966, and a north wing was added to the original building.  When the fall term began in 1968 there were 67 students and four teachers.

    Meanwhile, the old Lucas School building was used as a community center for several years after its closure.  The building burned down on May 8, 1970.  It was said that a cigarette set a construction trailer parked next to the school on fire.  High winds and unusually dry spring weather quickly spread the flames to the old wooden school building.

    That fall, due to continuing increases in the student population, Lovejoy added a fifth teacher.  Mrs. Spurgin served as the school’s principal until her death on November 13, 1972.  Veronica McClearin joined the faculty as 5th grade teacher and principal, and a teacher’s aide, Mrs. Mae Pierce, was employed.  Other teachers were Norma Lewis, Rachael Helton, Alta Browning, Carolyn Bushong, Billie McDonald, and Sue Harper (special help). The school enrolled 164 students in the 1st through 6th grades.  In March 1973, a bond issue of $170,000 was approved to build a new ten-classroom school building and to purchase additional land to increase the campus size. That building was completed in spring 1974 and the move to the new, 10,000 square foot Estelle Spurgin Elementary School was completed on April 5.

    A special bill passed by the 1975 Texas legislature allowed Lovejoy and other common school districts to set their own property tax rates.  Previously, common school districts’ rates were tied to those of their respective counties.  Lovejoy became an Independent School District in September 1978 when the Collin County Superintendent’s Office, like all county superintendents’ offices, was eliminated.  By early 1979, additional facilities were needed to relieve existing congestion and anticipated growth.  A second bond referendum was approved by voters for $785,000.  This bond sale allowed construction of ten new classrooms, a gymnasium, expanded administrative area, a teacher workroom, and an enlarged and improved school library.

    Mrs. McDonald continued as a member of the staff until her retirement at the end of the 1980-81 school year.  In summer 1983, the school was designated a Texas State Historical Site, and a plaque mounted in front of the “old red schoolhouse.”  In early 1984, it again became evident that continued enrollment would require still larger facilities.  In May, a $975,000 bond referendum passed, and work on twelve new classrooms and a new cafeteria began in late September.  A new library, a clinic, ten classrooms, a workroom, and a lounge were completed in 1993-94.

    In 1998, Lovejoy I.S.D. voters approved a $6.5 million bond sale for the construction of a new elementary school.  Joe V. Hart Elementary was completed in August 2000.  As the district continued to expand, it purchased land for four additional school sites, including land in Fairview for two new schools.   In 2003 the LISD conducted yet another significant election in which voters agreed to fund construction of a new Lovejoy High School and Lovejoy Middle School.  For many years, LISD paid the Allen school district to accept its secondary students. But with construction on the new LHS facility begun in summer 2004, sending Lovejoy kids to Allen schools will soon come to an end.  The expansive new facility will initially house both high school and middle school students, but plans are under way to build and open the first of two new middle schools in August 2008.  This new school will be located along the east side of FM 1378, not far from the site of Lick Springs, in Fairview.  A third Lovejoy elementary school will be built at the corner of Hart and Stoddard Roads in northwestern Fairview, also planned to open in 2008.  The final elementary school now planned by LISD will be in Lucas near Blondy Jhune.  (Blondy Jhune Road was named after Blondy Jhune Taylor, who died in 1987 at the age of 83.   She played the mandolin and was a frequent performer at local musical events.  The road was named for her because she was instrumental in getting it paved.)  A second middle school is planed at the intersection of FM 1378 and West Lucas Road, across the road from the Lucas City Hall.

    A portion of Fairview is now also served by the McKinney Independent School District.  Specifically, the area of the town west of the Roberts Branch of Wilson Creek, plus a small sliver in the far northeastern corner near Thompson Springs are a part of the MISD.

TOWN

    A petition to request an incorporation election for Fairview was submitted to the county judge and commissioners’ court on April 21, 1958.  The petition contained the following thirty-three names:  Edgar Bush, V. W. Glover, Joe Hooper, C. A, Ostrawn (sp?), M. E. Travillion, L. W. Bryson, Mrs. L. W. Bryson, Mrs. W. H. Ellenburg, W. M. Bush, Mrs. W. M. Bush, E. A. Hooper, Elsie Hooper, Mrs. V. W. Glover, P. L. Barksdale, Mrs. P. L. Barksdale, H. L. Lowry, Mrs. H. L. Lowry, L. M. Nelson, Mrs. L. M. Nelson, Mrs. J. F. Summers, H. J. Petefish, Mrs. H. J. Petefish, Mrs. Robert R. Miller, Mr. Robert R. Miller, Mrs. Clyde Geren, George Apple, Mrs. George Apple, H. L. Knight, Mrs. H. L. Knight, B. C. Knight (?), C. H. Murray, J. K. Wa(?)

Fairview came into existence following an election held at what was called the Fairview Grocery on May 7, 1958.  Ordered by Collin County Judge W. E. Button after submission of a petition, the purpose of the voting was to determine whether or not the Town of Fairview would be incorporated as a town.  The ballot choices were simple:  “Corporation” or “No Corporation.”  A total of fifty ballots were cast, with only two of those opposing incorporation.  Judge Button signed the order incorporating Fairview on May 12, 1958.

    According to accounts, the town’s name might just as easily have been Wetsel because there were two communities included in the incorporated land – Fairview and Wetsel.  The latter community began when Henry Wetsel, a Pennsylvania immigrant and carpenter by trade, sold his grist and flour mill in McKinney (a three- to five-oxen operation described as a “first-class ox mill”) and headrighted a square mile of land four to five miles south of town.  That land is memorialized today as the Henry Wetsel Survey.  He built his cabin on the Fisher and Sawyer stage road that ran from Austin through McKinney on its way to the Red River.  One account suggests Henry operated a new grist mill on the northwest corner of today’s Stacy Road and SH 5 beginning in about 1850.   Either here or at his McKinney mill he lost an arm in a terrible accident.  He also supposedly built a two-story house with large cedar trees in the front yard on the west side of the stagecoach road, and brought Bermuda grass back from East Texas and had the first lawn of its kind in the area.  This story seems not to ring true, however.  Lawns were not really “invented” for many more years, so the grass story may have more accurately described one of Henry’s descendants.

    His son James Wetsel came to the Peters Colony sometime before July 1848 as a single man, and himself patented 320 acres in 1850.   The census of that year shows him to be twenty years of age, from Illinois or Ohio, and a teamster.  He signed his name with an “X.”  It is not altogether certain if the community, which likely consisted of just a few cabins and the school (and maybe a mill), was named for Henry or his son James, or perhaps even another of Henry’s sons, Peter Lewis or David, both of whom also had headright properties in the area.  One thing that is clear is that the community was named for this family.

    A prominent feature in Wetsel was the old Indian Spring, located in the John A. Taylor headright.  Taylor married one of Henry’s daughters, Lucinda.  It was at the Taylors’ house that the Jim Reed shootout of 1874 supposedly occurred.

    The Wetsel community was located near the Exall Highway (Highway 5) and the present Stacy Road.  Stacy Road was itself originally called Wetsel Road, and was supposedly renamed by a “Miss Stacy” to honor her family.  The Stacy Farm was located in western Wetsel, in today’s Allen, and at least one member of the Stacy family stills lives in the area.  At the time of the incorporation of Fairview, Mr. H. L. “Hag” Knight ran a store on the northeast corner of Stacy (Wetsel) Road and SH 5.  Both Knight and his wife signed the incorporation petition.

    Another Wetsel community family was the Murrays.  Thomas Reed Murray was born in Buncombe County, Kentucky in 1830.  He married Dila Ward in 1848.  He later fought in the Civil War, and was captured at the Battle of the Big Black River in Mississippi.  In around 1871 Murray purchased land in the George Phillips and Joseph Dixon surveys, which are located east of the Samuel Sloan Survey (between today’s SH 5 and US 75).  Murray lived on this property until sometime in the 1920s.  The property included the current site of the Murray Farm and extended north to also include today’s Ranchette Estates subdivision.  One son, Thomas Owen Murray, was a school teacher, attorney, county judge, and state representative.

    Two sons, J. E. Murray and Robert Lewis Murray, both lived nearby beginning in the 1870s.  R. L. was born in 1857 and lived in Wetsel for 69 years.  In 1894 he married Mattie Martha Murray, who was born in Arkansas.  They had six children.  Their original house was a small cabin of one room, with a shed room attached to the back, and an upstairs room or loft accessible by outside stairs.  The building was constructed of boards made from split logs put together with wooden pegs.  The house was lost to fire in the 1940s, and a small two-room replacement house was built that still stands as of May 2006.  A new larger house was built next door by Hag and Lillie Mae Knight.

    To the north of Wetsel, the old original Fairview community was located at and southeast of the intersection of the present day State Highway 5 and FM 1378.  It was likely the approximate site of the 1840s community of Sloan’s Grove that might have been the county seat.  Samuel “Sam” Water Apple was born September 21, 1876 in Chestnut Mound, Tennessee.  He moved to an area east of McKinney in December 1881, and moved into town in 1894.  He and his wife, Emma Susan Beck Apple, moved their Pecan Grove Dairy to south of McKinney in about 1921, and by at least 1924 were calling it the Fairview Dairy.  Apple supposedly named his dairy for the pretty view from the front of the dairy’s hilltop location.  Sam was said to have commented that from his dairy he had a “fair view” toward McKinney.  Another version of the naming of the original Fairview was that Dewey Ray and George William Apple, Sam and Emma’s son, named Fairview for the view from a roadside park, complete with cabins, that was just north of the Fairview store on the Exall Highway.  According to Mattie Alice Apple Dickinson, Sam’s daughter, “My dad moved from Pecan Grove Dairy...  There was nothing there...  He called our dairy Fairview Dairy...  [H]e just thought it was pretty because it was kinda up on a hill and away he could see the farm, and it was a beautiful name.”

    At any rate, George took over the dairy in about 1924 when Sam moved back to McKinney.  George also opened the Fairview Grocery on the southeast corner of SH 5 and 1378 across the road from the dairy.  When the grocery started getting the dairy’s checks by mistake, its name was changed to the Apple Dairy to eliminate the confusion.  An historic photograph on display at town hall shows the grocery.  Cecil Apple used to train fighters in a barn on the Apple Farm in the early 1920s, apparently the same “old red barn” that remains there today.  Sam Apple died in 1942 and his wife Emma in 1955.  A source claims the dairy was forced to close when food laws required the pasteurization of milk and the dairy could not comply due to the unavailability of electricity.  Members of the Apple family still live on the family land.

    In 1958, as the City of McKinney threatened to annex the area, Robert Milligan (or Mulligan), a retired civil engineer, worked with George Apple to draw up and survey a plan and filed it with the Collin County Commissioners’ Court requesting incorporation.  Milligan had moved to the area to be near his kinsman, George Apple.  When it came time to name the new community, both Fairview and Wetsel were considered, but the Fairview name was chosen to honor the by-then Colonel George Apple, who helped lead the incorporation process.  According to original Fairview resident Lillie Mae Knight, “See, the old man, Mr. Sam Apple, was George Apple’s father, and George, really, was the leader of getting this little town built, you see.”  Ironically Milligan’s name does not appear on the petition requesting the incorporation election.  The new town extended all the way east to include FM 1378, and the old Lick Springs area.  Willie Hill owned much of the land and houses on 1378 there by Sloan Creek, and he ran a store by the creek.

    About this same time, Fairview got a new church, when on October 31, 1958 the Mount Olive Baptist Church purchased land from George Apple across the highway from his Fairview store and service station.  The first service at Mount Olive was held on June 21, 1959.  The church was renamed First Baptist Church of Fairview in July 1965, and a new building built in 1986.  The building today is the Good Seed Methodist Church, featuring Korean language services.

    Bill Glover, Sr. was elected the first mayor of Fairview.  Succeeding mayors included B. M. Stoddard, George Apple, Gary Olstrom, Orville Brown, Crim Watkins, Walter Cross, Maarten Vet, E. Peter Haas (1978-82), Fred Carvajal, Leahray S. Wroten, Donald T. Phillips (1997-2003), and Sim Israeloff (2003 to the present).  Apple was a noted auctioneer, and once served as Texas Chairman of Animal Health.

    A water system was built in 1966, with water purchased form the nearby North Texas Municipal Water District, which then as now took its water supply from Lake Lavon.  The NTMWD was itself created in 1951, while Lavon was still under construction.  The original town water tower is no longer in service, but does still stand along the north side of Stacy Road in old Wetsel, a reminder of the town’s past.

    In 1978 the McKinney Municipal Airport was opened in southernmost McKinney, resulting in a number of aircraft over-flights in Fairview.  In 1993 the two municipalities agreed to a plan by which planes leaving McKinney heading south would turn to the southeast and thereby avoid Fairview’s residential areas.  In the years 1998-2002 Fairview undertook a number of annexations to its north and east in an effort to better secure its boundaries with McKinney, and control non-residential growth.  McKinney filed suit against Fairview in 2002 seeking to reduce or eliminate these annexations.  In summer 2004, after almost eleven years, McKinney rescinded its southeast departure rules.

   

* * *

    According to the 1980 census, Collin County had nearly 2,400 businesses, with 25% of its population employed in manufacturing and another 23% working in wholesale or retail jobs.  The population had grown dramatically since 1960 too.  In that year’s census, the population of the newly consolidated Fairview was shown to be 175.  The Fairview population in 1970 reached 463, and by 1980, it was up to 893.  During those same two decades Plano grew from 3,695 to 72,331.  The county’s population totaled 144,576 in 1980.  In 1990 Plano reached nearly 130,000, the county reached 264,036, and Fairview had 1,554 residents.  In 2000, Fairview’s population was counted as 2,644, in January 2004 it was estimated at 4,100, and by January 2006 the population had soared to 6,303.

* * *

    The first wastewater, or sewer, service began in Fairview in 2001, in conjunction with construction of the Heritage Ranch development.  Heritage Ranch is a retirement community featuring a large, high-quality golf course and a number of other impressive amenities.

    In 1998 the town purchased 83 acres from the Powell family, long-time residents of the area north of Fairview.  The land is bordered on the south by Wilson Creek and has been set aside as a nature preserve.  More recently, in March 2004 the Nature Conservancy identified a rare tree habitat in the area of the Powell property and on the contiguous corner of another 200 acres the town acquired in spring 2002.  The group described the habitat as a significant forest association of bur oak, chinquapin oak, and shumard red oak.

    A unique zoning plan was approved in August 2002 by which the western end of the town, between US 75 and SH 5 were opened up to high density residential uses, and extensive office, retail, and mixed uses.  In 2003, approximately 300 acres of this over 800 acre site received an approved concept plan.  Owners of the land were David Petefish and Virginia Petefish Lea, long-time Fairview residents who had grown up in the area before its 1958 incorporation, and the children of two of the original incorporators.  In March 2006 the town entered into a $47 million development agreement that will bring approximately 1 million square feet of retail space to the area by 2009, plus office and apartment uses.

Another area soon to be developed is the Geer tract.  This property on the west side of SH 5 includes the old Murray Farm.  Behind the farmhouse is one of the few historical structures remaining in Fairview.  The old two room house, built perhaps in the 1920s, was more recently used as a barn and still looks like a barn from the outside.  But the interior reveals what was once a home, with a fireplace, a porch, and an attic space.  The structure will likely be demolished as development begins in 2006.

    Two acres of land were purchased in late 2002 at the intersection of Stacy Road and FM 1378, bringing the total amount of town-owned land at that intersection to five acres.  The town currently has a small elevated water tank there now, and future plans call for a park, additional water storage, and possibly a fire station.

    Fairview’s first municipal park, Creekside, opened in autumn 2004.  Its second park, Beaver Run in the Thompson Springs subdivision, will open in 2006, thanks in part to a matching grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.  A third park, in Summerhill Farms, will be built using a matching grant from Collin County, and still a fourth will be built by the developer of the Greer tract.

* * *

    In the fall of 2005 the Fairview Town Council appointed a commission of fifteen local citizens to write a home rule charter for the town.  In Texas, municipalities may change from general law to home rule once they reach 5,000 in population.  General law cities have much less local control, generally possessing only those powers allowed it by state laws.  On the other hand, home rule municipalities generally are said to have all those powers not prohibited by the state, and therefore have much more local autonomy.  Such municipalities must write a charter, or local constitution, and that charter must be approved by a vote of the municipality’s citizens.  Fairview’s home rule charter was finalized by the charter on March 2 – Texas Independence Day – and was approved by popular vote on May 13, 2006.   The new charter added a seventh member to the town council, imposed term limits of six years on elected officials, created a place system for council members to encourage participation and competition, expanded annexation authority, gave the mayor the right to vote, formally established a council-manager form of government, and granted citizens the powers of referendum, recall, and initiative.

Prepared by John Godwin

SOURCES

AR Consultants, Inc., An Archaeological Survey Within the Proposed Thompson Springs Park (April 26, 2005).

AR Consultants, Inc., Cultural Resources Evaluation of the Fairview Park (1999).

Harold Beam, A History of Collin County (August 1951).

Edgar Bush, Bush reminisces about early county life, (McKinney, Texas:  McKinney Courier-Gazette, July 3, 1986).

Lindy Fisher, Interview with Elizabeth Bush Roberts.

Lindy Fisher, Letter to John Godwin (2003).

Lindy Fisher & Helen Hall, A Collection of the History of Fairview (Fairview, Texas:  personal compilation 19??).

Joy Gough, Collin County Place Names (McKinney, Texas:  May 1996).

Captain Roy Franklin Hall and Helen Gibbard Hall, Collin County: Pioneering in North Texas (Quanah, Texas:  Nortex, 1975).

Gary Hancock, Lovejoy historical landmark (Allen Texas:  The Allen American, 1983).

Mary Leberman, Fairview is 14 Years Old (Allen, Texas:  The Allen American, 19??).

Denise Maddox, Robbery of the Express Train at Allen Station (1997).

James M. Muse, Prehistoric History of Collin County (McKinney, Texas)

Jim B. Pearson, et al, Texas: The Land and Its People (Dallas: Hendrick-Long Publishing Com-pany, 1978).

Gwendyn Pettit, Lick Springs, Forest Grove combined to form Lovejoy (Allen, Texas:  The Allen American, November 3, 1991).

Gwendyn Pettit, Willow Springs School Educated Kids in the Late 1800s (Allen, Texas:  The Allen American, December 2, 1990).

Ed Phillips, History of Lucas (Lucas, Texas:  Personal website compilation, 2004).

J. Lee and Lillian J. Stambaugh, A History of Collin County (Austin:  Texas State Historical Association, 1958).

Texas State Historical Association, ed., The Handbook of Texas Online (Austin:  TSHA, 2004).

Page Thomas, An interview with George Apple (1993).

Clara McKinney Reddell, History, McKinney and Collin County (McKinney, Texas:  Collin County Central Museum, 1959, 1986).

Mrs. Ron Samuels, The Snider Family – Collin County Pioneers (Dallas Texas:  Local History and Genealogical Society, September 1972).

Mrs. John Shipp, History of Lucas School, 2004-05.

Bill Sinsabaugh, E-mail memories to John Godwin, September 10, 2005.

Town of Fairview, Petition to Incorporate Fairview (1958).

John Shipp, William Snider built first corn mill in Collin County, (McKinney, Texas:  McKinney Courier-Gazette, December 7, 1975).

United States Decennial Census, Collin County, Texas, 1850.

United States Decennial Census, Collin County, Texas, 1960.

Ellen Jeanene Walker, Agricultural Land Utilization in Collin County (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1969).

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