The History of Sachse, Texas

William Sachse came to America from Herford, Prussia, in 1840 and arrived in Texas in 1845, at age 25, securing 640 acres in Collin County. He later acquired some 5,000 acres more and built one of the first cotton mills and gins in the county — worked by ox and horse power until an 1869 fire destroyed the gin and it was replaced with a steam plant. He married Elizabeth Straly, a widow who held a 320-acre Peters Colony land grant patented in 1846; the town is named for the couple. He became the anchor of a small farming community in the black-dirt country northeast of Dallas.

The town got its name and its name got mangled in the same stroke. In 1886 Sachse gave the railroad a hundred feet of frontage straight through his holdings, and the railroad built a depot on it and named the stop Sachse. But the depot sign read 'Saxie,' and for years afterward old legal documents referred to the community that way. The misspelling was finally corrected in 1892. Either way, a Prussian farmer's surname was now fixed to a Texas town.

For most of its history Sachse was a small agricultural community straddling the Dallas–Collin county line, too far out to be pulled into the city's growth. That changed as the metro sprawled northeast toward Lake Ray Hubbard and the Collin County boom. Sachse filled in with subdivisions and, in recent years, anchored a new mixed-use district around its old rail line — a modest, family-oriented suburb still carrying the name of the immigrant who built one of the county's first gins.