Settlers had to fight twice before this ground held
Tennyson Parkway runs through prairie that settlers first tried to claim in 1841, only to be driven off by two attacks in 1842 and 1843, according to Collin County's own history. Nobody resettled the ground until 1844, after which Henry Cook arrived in 1845 and buried his son in 1847, founding what became Plano's oldest cemetery nearby.
Attacks drove settlers off this ground in 1842 and 1843
Settlers first tried to plant a town on this open prairie in 1841. Collin County's own history records two separate attacks on those settlements in 1842 and 1843. The attacks came during a violent stretch across North Texas, when the young Republic of Texas was pushing settlement into land its Indigenous inhabitants had not given up. Whatever cabins and fields went up in 1841 did not survive intact. The settlement effort collapsed and the ground sat unclaimed again. Nobody moved back in to stay until 1844.
That is the plain shape of it: an attempt, a defeat, and a three-year gap before anyone tried again. No name survives for who lived in those first cabins or who attacked them, only that the fight happened and the settlers left.
A War of 1812 veteran buried his son here
The man most closely tied to this ground once it did hold was Henry Cook, a veteran of the War of 1812 who arrived in 1845 as part of the Peters Colony, a land-grant scheme that brought thousands of American families into North Texas. His log house stood as a landmark on the Shawnee Trail, the route cattle drivers later used to push herds north out of Texas. In 1847, two years into his tenure, Cook buried his own son Daniel on the property. That grave became the beginning of what still sits 1,037 meters from this spot, the oldest cemetery in Plano. Cook's daughter, Rachel Cook Baccus, deeded the burial ground to his heirs in 1878 and later gave adjoining land for a church. The cemetery took her name around 1915. The church built on her gift closed in the 1930s, but the graves stayed, and the cemetery is still in use today.
Vacant JCPenney land sat empty for decades
The land where Legacy West now stands, a mile northeast, followed its own long stall. JCPenney bought roughly 240 acres there in 1987 to move its corporate headquarters to Texas from New York City. The land sat empty for over two decades. Only in 2014, after Toyota announced it would relocate its North American headquarters to the same tract, did developers break ground on what became a $2 billion mixed-use district. It opened to the public on June 2, 2017, with Plano's mayor and the Texas Secretary of State cutting the ribbon. Nearly thirty years passed between the land changing hands and anything permanent rising on it.
A bus station stalled by recession for a decade
A similar stall played out closer to where you stand. A bus station tentatively called the Westside Park & Ride was proposed in 2000 for a site along the Dallas North Tollway, between Tennyson Parkway and Spring Creek Parkway. The dot-com crash and the recession that followed put the project on hold for a decade. Construction did not begin until 2010, funded through the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and the station now known as Northwest Plano Park & Ride finally opened on July 30, 2012, twelve years after it was first proposed.
The flat ground along Tennyson Parkway keeps making people wait, and keeps letting them stay once they do.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.