The History of Allen, Texas

Allen was established in 1870 and named for Ebenezer Allen, a former Texas attorney general who helped promote the railroad. That railroad — the Houston & Texas Central — reached town in 1872 and gave Allen its reason to exist, hauling out the cotton and grain of the surrounding Blackland farms. It was a small, ordinary depot community, the kind of place that would have stayed a footnote if not for one February night.

On February 22, 1878, Sam Bass and his gang held up the Houston & Texas Central passenger train when it stopped at the Allen station — traditionally called the first train robbery in Texas. They cracked the safe for about $1,280, mostly in silver coins, and rode off to the northwest. Bass had bigger scores elsewhere, but the Allen robbery put the town in the history books, and it still celebrates the episode with a Sam Bass Day, where local students reenact the holdup. History has since decided Bass was 'probably more inept than brave,' but a good outlaw story never really goes away.

Allen stayed small for a long time, then rode the Collin County growth wave into a city of more than 100,000. Subdivisions and retail — the Allen Premium Outlets, the Watters Creek district — filled in the farmland along US-75. And Allen made national news for something very Texas: in 2012 the school district opened a high school football stadium that cost around $60 million, a monument to how seriously this part of the state takes Friday nights. The railroad town that Sam Bass robbed became a prosperous suburb that builds cathedrals to high school football.