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.
Then, in 1881, fire nearly ended it. A blaze tore through the wooden downtown and destroyed all fifty-one of its business structures — only one survived. Rather than fold, Plano rebuilt in brick, and that decision is why Historic Downtown Plano still stands today, its oldest brick buildings dating to the 1890s. The rebuilt main street, the 1884 Schimelpfenig dry-goods building among its survivors, is a record in masonry of a town that refused to disappear.
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.
