The History of Royse City, Texas

People started moving to the area in 1885, once word got out that the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad — the Katy — would be built through that part of the county. The man behind it was Garrett Burgess Griffin Royse, known as Byrd Royse, born in Adair County, Kentucky, in 1838, who had been instrumental in getting the Katy line brought from Greenville to Dallas through Rockwall County. In 1886 he platted the townsite and sold the first lots. The first business, a general store, opened in December 1885, and others followed — some of them physically pulled on rollers from the nearby town of Fate to be on the new railroad. By 1890 the community had a thousand people, two cotton gins, a gristmill, and twenty businesses.

For most of its life Royse City — originally just 'Royse' — was a farming and shipping town in the northeastern corner of Rockwall County, its edges spilling over into Collin and Hunt counties. Cotton and grain moved out on the Katy line, the square did business, and the town grew slowly and steadily without ever booming. It was the kind of small county-line community that the metro, for a long time, simply passed by.

That changed when Interstate 30's corridor east of Dallas became the metro's next growth frontier. Royse City's population, under 3,000 in 2000, more than tripled to over 9,000 by 2010 and kept climbing past 13,000 by 2020, as subdivisions filled the farmland around the old townsite. Byrd Royse's railroad gamble, laid out in 1886, finally paid off in a wave of growth the founder could never have pictured — a boomtown on the interstate, still carrying his name.