The twentieth century brought the electric Interurban, whose 1908 depot now houses a railway museum, and then a transformation no early Planoite could have pictured. As Dallas spilled north in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the farm town became one of the fastest-growing suburbs in the Sun Belt; corporate headquarters followed, the population multiplied many times over, and Plano grew into the ninth-largest city in Texas — home now to more transplants than native Texans. Yet the old bones show through: straight section-line roads, a preserved downtown, and, every September, a Blackland sky full of hot-air balloons rising over ground that was prairie long before it was a city.
What turned a farm settlement into a town was the railroad. When the Houston & Texas Central Railway reached Plano in 1872, it connected the Blackland farms to distant cotton and grain markets and made the town Collin County's commercial hub almost overnight; warehouses, gins, and a depot rose where there had been open prairie. Plano incorporated on June 2, 1873, with C.J.E. Kellner as its first mayor. For the rest of the century it grew as a cotton, wheat, and milling center — a busy little market town shipping the prairie's harvest out to the wider world under a very big Texas sky.
Why People Visit Plano
Plano rewards visitors who want Texas history without the crowds of a tourist town — a genuine 1891 farmstead, a brick Main Street rebuilt after the great fire, an electric-railway museum, and nature preserves on the old Blackland Prairie. People come for the Heritage Farmstead and the downtown arts district, for the September balloons over the prairie, and for an easy, welcoming North-Texas day with real roots behind it.
