Most towns in Collin County can point to a founding date. Anna can point to a building. The small wooden depot that sits today at the corner of Sherley Avenue and 4th Street was raised in 1885 by the Houston and Texas Central Railway, and it has outlasted every other railroad station of its kind in the state. It is the oldest surviving railroad depot in Texas, and the reason Anna exists at all.
The order of events matters here, because it is the opposite of how most suburbs grow. Anna was not a town that later got a train. It was a train stop that later became a town. The rail line came through the Blackland Prairie north of McKinney first, the depot went up to serve it, and the settlement organized itself around the tracks. The community was platted in 1883, two years before the depot was built, and did not formally incorporate as a city until 1913 — nearly three decades after the station’s first agent unlocked the door.
What the building actually was
The 1885 depot was a working machine, not a monument, and its design shows it. When it was built, the structure ran about 70 feet in length and was divided into three rooms, each with a job. On one end sat the agent’s office, fitted with a bay window that let the agent lean out and watch the track in both directions, plus a small ticket window for passengers. The center room was the passenger waiting area. The north end was reserved for freight — the crates, mail, and farm goods that were the real reason a prairie town wanted a rail connection in the first place.
The first person to run all of that was an agent named Andrew Sherley, whose name now sits on the avenue the depot faces and on the downtown park that holds it. In 1937, as rail traffic patterns changed, the building was cut down from its original 70 feet to roughly 30 — a common fate for depots as the freight business shifted, and a detail that still shows in the building’s proportions if you know to look for it.
Nearly lost, then rescued
For a structure this old, survival was never guaranteed. Wooden depots are exactly the kind of building that quietly disappears — torn down for the land, lost to fire, or simply left to rot once the trains stop needing them. By the 2000s the Anna depot was at real risk.
The Anna Area Historical Preservation Society stepped in and rescued the building in 2007, moving it to a temporary location to buy it time. The permanent save came more than a decade later. In May 2018 the depot was relocated to its current home in Sherley Heritage Park, and a full restoration was completed in September 2019. The work returned the building to something close to its working-life condition rather than dressing it up as a replica, which is part of why it reads as authentic today.
That restoration turned a rescued relic into something a town can actually use. The building now serves as the Anna Depot and Museum, a local history collection covering Anna and the surrounding area. Admission is free, and the museum keeps deliberately modest hours: it is open the second and fourth Saturday of each month, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Those are volunteer hours, run by the same preservation-minded residents who kept the building standing, so they are worth confirming before a special trip.
The park around it
The depot does not sit alone. Sherley Heritage Park, at 101 South Sherley Ave, was built to give the station a setting that matches its story. Alongside the restored depot, the park includes a community-built, train-themed playground and a pavilion, which makes it one of the few places in North Texas where a child can climb on a play structure shaped like the thing that gave their town its start.
The train theme is not decoration for its own sake. It is a way of keeping the connection legible for people who never rode the Houston and Texas Central and never will. A restored depot behind a chain-link fence is a curiosity. A restored depot next to a playground where families actually spend Saturday mornings is a living piece of downtown, and that is the harder thing to pull off.
Why it still matters
It would be easy to treat the depot as a nice piece of trivia — the oldest one in Texas, a plaque, a photo op. But the building is doing something more useful than that for a town growing as fast as Anna is.
Anna’s population has climbed into the low-to-mid 30,000s, and most of that growth is brand new: subdivisions on the edges, retail along US-75, families who arrived in the last few years and have no particular reason to know that the town was a rail stop before it was a bedroom community. A 140-year-old depot in the middle of downtown is a standing argument that Anna is a place with a past, not just a fast-filling zip code between McKinney and Sherman.
That is the quiet work a preserved landmark does. It gives newcomers a shared story to inherit and gives longtime families a reason to bring the next generation downtown. The Houston and Texas Central stopped running passengers through Anna a long time ago. The depot it left behind is still, in its own way, keeping the town connected.
Planning a visit
The Anna Depot and Museum is free and sits at the corner of Sherley Avenue and 4th Street, within Sherley Heritage Park at 101 South Sherley Ave. The museum’s regular hours are the second and fourth Saturday of each month, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., though the surrounding park — playground, pavilion, and the exterior of the depot itself — is open far more often. For families, pairing a museum Saturday with time on the train-themed playground makes for an easy, low-cost morning that doubles as a history lesson nobody has to sit still for.
