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.
The land was Blackland Prairie long before it was a town — a stretch of Collin County that drew settlers under the Peters' Colony land grants of the Republic of Texas. Families from Kentucky, Tennessee, and across the older South arrived in 1845 and 1846, breaking the tough prairie sod for wheat, corn, and cattle, and William Foreman put up a sawmill and gristmill that became the settlement's nucleus. The frontier era that opened the prairie to these farms also displaced the Native peoples who had long lived across North Texas, a hard fact of the period. A post office came around 1852, and the first physician, Dr. Henry Dye, is credited with proposing the name that stuck: plano, for the flat country all around.
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.
