The 1885 depot gets most of the attention, and deservedly — it is the oldest surviving railroad station in Texas, and it anchors downtown. But a depot is a middle chapter, not a beginning. The story of how Anna came to exist starts earlier, involves a settlement that no longer appears on any map, and hinges on a question the town has never fully settled: who, exactly, was Anna named for.
Who was Anna?
Start with the name, because it is more contested than most residents realize. The mainstream account, the one the historical record leans toward, is that Anna was named for Anna Quinlan, daughter of George A. Quinlan, a superintendent of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. In a railroad town, being named after a rail official’s daughter is not romantic so much as ordinary — the people laying the track named the stops, and they often named them after their own.
There is a competing, more folkloric version that credits Anna Huntington, daughter of the railroad magnate C.P. Huntington. It is a good story, and you will hear it locally, but it functions better as legend than as documented fact. The Quinlan version is the one the sources support. When you tell a newcomer where the town’s name comes from, the honest answer is the Quinlan account, with the Huntington tale offered as the pleasant piece of local lore it is.
The town that Anna replaced
Anna did not rise in an empty landscape. It rose because of what the railroad did to the towns around it — and one town in particular paid the price.
Before the rails arrived, a nearby community called Mantua was the established settlement in this stretch of Collin County. Then the Houston and Texas Central line pushed through in the early 1870s. Through rail service connecting the Gulf to St. Louis opened in March 1873, and the effect on the local map was decisive. New railroad towns rose along the tracks — Anna and neighboring Van Alstyne among them — while Mantua, bypassed by the line, declined and effectively vanished. Anna, in other words, is partly built on the fortunes the railroad transferred from an older neighbor to a new stop. It is a pattern that repeated across Texas in that era: the track decided which towns lived and which faded.
Worth noting for the deeper timeline: this ground had European-descended settlers well before the railroad. Collin McKinney — one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and the man for whom both the county and its seat are named — had settled within a few miles of the future townsite back in 1846, nearly three decades before the rails came through.
Platted in 1883: a town of twenty
Anna’s formal beginning as a place you could buy a lot in came in 1883, when the town was platted. The scale of it then is almost hard to picture now. At platting, Anna had a population of about twenty people, two stores, a steam gristmill, and a Baptist church. A post office opened the same year. By 1890 the population had grown to somewhere in the range of a hundred to two hundred.
Set that against today’s figures and the contrast is staggering. The town that started with twenty residents and a gristmill was estimated at 35,245 people in 2025, and it made national lists as one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. The distance between those two Annas — the 1883 hamlet and the 2020s boomtown — is the whole story of the place compressed into a single comparison.
The depot, briefly
The railroad that made the town naturally left it a station. The depot went up in 1885, built by the Houston and Texas Central. It is covered in depth elsewhere, so it is enough to say here that it is billed as the oldest extant railroad station in Texas, that it was originally about 70 feet long before being shortened to roughly 30 feet in 1937, and that after the railroad abandoned it in the mid-1950s it survived as a barn until the Anna Area Historical Preservation Society rescued it in 2007. It was moved to Sherley Heritage Park in May 2018, with restoration completed in September 2019. The depot is the artifact. The town around it is the subject.
Incorporation, and the man who ran the first store
Anna did not become a legal city until 1913, three decades after it was platted and 28 years after the depot was built. Its first mayor was John F. Greer, a figure who tied the incorporation back to the town’s earliest days — he had arrived around 1870 and built the community’s first home and store. There is a neat symmetry in the town’s first storekeeper becoming its first mayor: the person who helped start the commercial life of the place ended up presiding over its formal birth as a city.
The names on the map
One of the pleasures of Anna’s history is how much of it is still legible in the modern town, if you know where to look. The founding families did not just settle here — their names became the street signs, park signs, and school signs of the growing city.
The Sherley name is the clearest thread. Andrew Sherley was the depot’s first agent, and his surname now marks Sherley Avenue, the downtown Sherley Heritage Park that holds the relocated depot, and Rosamond-Sherley Elementary School. It has even reappeared on the newest layer of the town: Sherley Farms, a 970-plus-acre, $1.5 billion master-planned community that broke ground in 2026, carries the family name into Anna’s future. Few families get to have their name on both the 1885 depot and a 21st-century development a mile or two away.
The Slayter family, another of the original settler families, lives on in Slayter Creek Park and Slayter Creek Middle School. These are not decorative names chosen from a plat book at random — they are the actual families who established the town, still attached to the places where today’s residents play ball and send their kids to school.
Where to go deeper
For anyone who wants the primary-source version rather than the summary, the Anna Area Historical Preservation Society published a genuinely serious local history in 2018: a 484-page volume titled The Spark That Ignited The Town of Anna, covering the depot, the early homes, the cemeteries, and the schools. It is the deep reference for the town’s origins, and it exists precisely because a community growing this fast risks forgetting where it started.
There is also broader county heritage a short drive away. In neighboring McKinney, inside Collin County’s Myers Park, the free Collin County Farm Museum preserves the agricultural history of the wider region — the farming world that surrounded early Anna before the subdivisions arrived. It is a county institution rather than an Anna one, open on Wednesday afternoons, but it fills in the rural backdrop against which towns like Anna grew.
Why it is worth knowing
It would be easy, in a town where most residents arrived in the last few years, for all of this to disappear under the sheer volume of new construction. But the history is not filed away in a museum drawer. It is on the depot downtown, on the avenue that runs past it, on the park where the ball fields are, and on the sign outside an elementary school. Anna started as a railroad’s afterthought — a stop named for an official’s daughter, built on a neighbor’s decline, platted with twenty people. That it is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the country does not erase that beginning. If anything, it makes the beginning worth telling.
