History of McKinney Texas
Order your copy of McKinney, Texas: The First 150 Years
Check out Ken Cole's Historic
McKinney Photos!
Enjoy a photo of an old McKinney Texaco Station - circa
1910
See some old McKinney Postcards
Read about the Lee-Peacock Feud
Another Lee-Peacock Link
1948 McKinney Tornado Damage Photo
1959 McKinney Phonebook Image
Great photo collection from
the Old Collin County Prison!
The Early Days
The history of McKinney, one of the oldest
towns in North Texas, dates back over one hundred and fifty years to 1841, when the first
settlers arrived in the region from Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Collin County got
its name five years later, when the state’s first legislators, meeting under the
Constitution of the State in 1846, created Collin, Denton, Hunt, and Grayson counties out
of the territory that had been named Fannin County, an area that encompassed most of
Northeast Texas.
The original county seat was established in
Buckner in 1846, but just two years later, the seat was moved three miles eastward to a
more central location, and was renamed McKinney. Both the county and its seat were named
after Collin McKinney (see accompanying article). The town was originally incorporated in
1849, and was re-incorporated on May 28, 1859.
Firsts
McKinney’s first postmaster was Joel
F. Stewart in 1848, the first merchant was John L. Lovejoy, and the first newspaper in
town was the McKinney Messenger, published by James W. Thomas in 1858. McKinney’s
first church was organized in 1848 by J.B. Wilmeth, who had also created Collin
County’s first church two years earlier. The initial meetings of the First Christian
Church of McKinney were held in the Wilmeth blacksmith shop, and were later moved to an
upper room of the Wilmeth house. McKinney was also the home of James W. Throckmorton, the
11th governor of Texas, who later served in the United States Congress. Other frequent
visitors to the town were Jesse and Frank James and their James Gang, who came to McKinney
to visit their cousin "Tuck" Hill, whose historic house still stands just west
of downtown.
The railroad came through McKinney in 1872
-- the East Line, linking the young town with Jefferson, Texas. The first City Hall was
built in 1882 on S. Kentucky St., the second built in 1909. The first McKinney fire
company was organized in 1878, and electric lights were introduced in 1889.
In 1850, the population of Collin County
was 1,950. By the turn of the century, it had topped 50,000, while today nearly 300,000
people call the county home. Land value has increased proportionally as well: the taxable
value per acre in 1849 was a mere 68 cents; by 1872 it was up to $5.75 an acre, and in
1923 that number had jumped to $25-50 an acre.
Historically Significant Buildings
There are a number of historically
significant buildings in McKinney, contributing to a certain 19th century charm that has
earned the town a listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Among the oldest
and most interesting are:
- The Old Collin County Courthouse: built in
1876, the first permanent building on the downtown square.
- The Old Collin County Jail: built in 1880, a
site that has become popular with Hollywood filmmakers in recent years as a movie
location.
- The First Methodist Church: built in 1900,
which stands as the oldest existing church in town.
- The original home of Captain
"Tuck" Hill, friend of Jesse and Frank James: built in 1877 and located at 616
W. Virginia.
- Another place made famous by Hollywood, the
house used as the haunted house in the movie Benji built in 1870 and located at
1104 S. Tennessee.
There are many more historically
significant buildings in downtown McKinney and the surrounding areas. Take a Walk/Ride
tour and see them all!
Collin McKinney
Collin McKinney, the man for whom the town
of McKinney and its surrounding county were named, was born April 17, 1766, in New Jersey,
one of ten children of Daniel and Mercy Blatchley McKinney. When Collin was a young boy,
his family moved to a sparsely populated area of Kentucky, where Collin grew up amid
regular raids by neighboring Indian tribes attempting to reclaim their lands.
On February 10, 1794, Collin married Amy
Moore. The couple had four children: Ashley, Jimmy, Emeline, and Polly. The two middle
children died in infancy, and their mother passed on in 1804. Collin married again the
next year to Betsy Coleman, with whom he had seven more children: William C., Amy and
Margaret (twins), Anna C., Samuel Leek, Eliza S., and Younger Scott. In 1805 Collin was
named a Magistrate, a post he would hold until he moved to Texas.
In 1818, Collin moved his family to
Tennessee, where he was hired to manage the estate of Senator George Washington Campbell,
when the Senator was appointed Minister to Russia. In this post, Collin began to meet and
befriend influential people of the region, and in 1831, when he moved to Hickman’s
Prairie on the Red River, he was acknowledged as the political helmsman for his large
section of the Red River District. A few years later, Collin and four other
representatives to the convention meeting at Old Washington-on-the-Brazos were drafted by
Judge Richard Ellis to write a declaration of separation from Mexico. That document became
known as the Declaration of Independence, and it bears Collin McKinney’s signature.
He later went on to serve the Red River District in the First, Second, and Fourth
Congresses of the Republic.
From 1844 to 1846, Collin served as a guide
for people settling in North Texas from Kentucky and Arkansas, making the trip eleven
times on horseback. Around 1846, Collin moved his family again, this time to an area near
Anna, Texas, and in 1846, the county was renamed Collin County. Two years later, his
legacy was further cemented when the county seat, recently moved from Buckner, was named
McKinney in his honor.
He served under eight different governments
in his life: he was born a subject of King George III, and later became a citizen of the
Colonial Government of the 13 Colonies; the United States; Mexico; the Provisional
Government established by the Texans in 1835; the Texas Republic until annexation; the
United States again; and finally the Southern Confederacy.
Collin died on September 8, 1861, at the
age of 95, and he is buried in a marked grave in the cemetery at Van Alstyne.
In his book about the signers of the Texas
Declaration of Independence, The Men Who Made Texas Free, Samuel Houston Dixon
wrote, "Mr. McKinney was a man of most admirable character. He possessed a spirit of
progressiveness which dominated his life. No one of that group of pioneers exercised a
more wholesome influence over those with whom he came in contact than Mr. McKinney. He
lived a life worthy of emulation and was held in high esteem."
Fun Facts about McKinney
- 1841- First pioneer settlers came to Collin
County
- 1848 - The U.S. Post Office Department
changes the name of the new county seat from Buckner to McKinney
- 1866 - Jesse and Frank James and their James
Gang are frequent visitors to McKinney where their cousin "Tuck" Hill lives.
- 1872 - The first railroad comes through
Collin County. The East Line links McKinney to Jefferson, Texas.
- 1878 - McKinney organizes its first fire
company, complete with a small, hand-pulled pumper and a hose cart.
- 1889 - The city of McKinney gets electric
lights.
- 1910 - Street cars come to McKinney.
- 1912 - Professor C. F. Walsh flies the first
airplane flight in Collin County, taking to the skies over the McKinney Fair Grounds.
- 1915 - The County Federation of Women's Club
is organized to include women's literary and service clubs from around the county.
- 1996 - McKinney
Online is launched. : )
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