Cows Come Home To Collin County

“Go with me where the famous winter wheat stands hip high and promises a luxurious harvest of the finest biscuit flour on earth; where meadows of native grass recall the vast ranges of yesteryear; where they buried the scrub boar years ago purchased sires are standard equipment on every stock farm; where garlic enough to flavor the breath of Mussolini’s minions grows almost accidentally; and where 3,500 of her 6,300 farms have steam pressure canning equipment.” Collin County, Texas was probably not the first place you thought of after reading the glowing description above but that paragraph, even with reference to Mussolini, was pulled straight from the August 1931 issue of the Farm and Ranch newspaper. 

 I came upon the yellowed newspaper in a corner of the Allen Antique Mall that has occupied the former Beals Department Store for many years. I was searching for an old Sad Sack comic book for a different Flipside column when I found the farming newspaper for twenty times its original price of five cents. For $1.50 I could have signed up for a 3-year subscription in 1931. 

 Farm and Ranch was apparently published in Dallas but this issue focused on the rapidly changing farms to the north in Collin County. “Stately country homes of a Victorian vintage, embowered by lovingly planted trees, recall the spacious life of those aggressive entrepreneurs who plowed the prairie to raise homes while herds roamed to multiply and fatten with little care.” 

 I believe Kohls and Krogers now embower the above mentioned prairie while suburbanites cruise the restaurant row to fatten with little care. The feature story called “The Cows Are Coming Home To Collin County,” takes great pains to describe Collin County “yesterday and today.” “This is perhaps the richest soil county in the state wrote Governor J.W. Throckmorton in 1867.” 

According to Farm and Ranch, Throckmorton’s family came to Collin County “before the Secession” in 1841. Western Collin County (Frisco) was a vast unfenced pasture until after the war (Civil War), says the author. “Today these flats are yielding 15 to as high as 35 bushels of wheat per acre. The author, T.C. Richardson, moves on to describe the housing boom in McKinney. “Now the modern bungalow elbows the old fashioned farm home, hard highways penetrate every section of the county so that farmers roll smoothly and wagons remain unbogged on the streets of McKinney.” A modernized version might read: “now the McMansions elbow out the ranch houses of the eighties and six-lane streets penetrate every section of the county so that residents roll smoothly across town and remain unbogged on the Central Expresway. 

 The descriptions of Collin County throughout the four-page story are fascinating and eloquent. Here Richardson looks back on early farming in the county. “Where the cradle sang through the wheat with the sweep of muscular arms and the binders joked as they twisted wisps of straw around the sheaves; the tractor now snorts and the combine cuts, threshes and winnows the grain.” 

 The article about changing Collin County is more than a novelty. It comes across as a reminder that change is a relative term. T.C Richardson says it best in the closing lines of his story. “The highest mark of Americanism is the vision to see both obligation and opportunity; and the nerve to cast aside outworn ways for those which fit a new and different regime. My contacts lead me to believe that Collin County has this kind of leadership and an intelligent fellowship to complete the team.” There is no reason to modernize that paragraph – it could have been written yesterday.