The History of Princeton, Texas

In the late 1870s the Wilson brothers, T.B. and George, were farming near the future townsite when, in 1881, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad — the Katy — extended its line from Greenville to McKinney right across their land. The stop was known as Wilson's Switch. But when residents applied for a post office, the name Wilson was already taken, so they submitted 'Princeton' instead, honoring Prince Dowlin, a local landowner and promoter of the town. The post office opened in 1888, and Princeton was on the map.

Princeton became the onion center of Collin County, shipping the crop out by rail alongside wheat, corn, and sorghum, and the town leaned into it — when the local women organized a study club, they spelled onion backward and called themselves the Noino Study Club. The town also housed a lumber factory that became the state's largest producer of bois d'arc lumber, the tough Osage-orange wood prized for fence posts. Princeton even played a small part in World War II: in 1945 a local camp was converted into a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Germans, one of some 120 such camps across Texas.

For most of the 20th century Princeton stayed a small farm town on U.S. 380 east of McKinney. Then the Collin County growth wave, which had already transformed the county's western half, rolled east — and Princeton became one of the fastest-growing cities in the entire country, its onion fields and farmland giving way to subdivisions almost overnight. The small town that named its study club after an onion is now on the leading edge of the metro's relentless expansion.