Denison lies north of Sherman in Grayson County, Texas and is, without doubt, one of the most interesting cities in the Red River Valley. Founded by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway in 1872 (well, kind of; it's the MKT's arrival on Christmas 1872 when the little hamlet took off like a rocket!), its relatively short existence belies the incredible amount of change this city has seen.
The MKT traveled from Missouri into Texas through Indian Territory. It was the first railroad that connected Texas to northern markets, which made Denison a very important city in the period after the Civil War. At one point, Denison saw seven (maybe more -this is my rough estimate) railroads converge onto its center. One of these railroads was the Houston & Texas Central Railway, which had received the charter to connect to the MKT at the Red River. The H&TC actually built Red River City to accommodate the connection, but instead, the MKT just simply past this point and made up its own town.
It wasn't supposed to, but it did. And because Denison became the hub and not Red River City, the city of Denison welcomed people flocking from all over the country and world. It was a boom town, and a large portion of newcomers arrived from Kansas. The city funded public schools, albeit segregated schools, and never really had a "segregated" neighborhood. It was completely different from other towns in the state. It was focused on industry and productivity.
Today, most of what remains of this vast infrastructure lies in ruin or has simply vanished.
One of Denison's main employers, and major site of its industrial activity, were the MKT shops located beneath by the Austin Street viaduct just south of Denison's downtown (today, the viaduct is known as Eisenhower Parkway). Once the work place of Dwight D. Eisenhower's father and also the site of a major labor union dispute, the shops moved to Ray Yard in west Denison after a fire burned the roundhouse in the 1920s. The downtown rail yard continued to be used for switching until the 1990s, when the MKT was subsumed into the Union Pacific Railroad. The tracks were removed as all the shunting was done at Ray Yard. The same goes for the Houston & Texas Central Railway. It, too, was incorporated into the Missouri Pacific, then Southern Pacific, then into the Union Pacific Railroad, and its shops in Denison were destroyed. The H&TC tracks were later acquired by the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway, and today, the old right-of-way once used by the H&TC is traversed by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe.
I decided to see if I could find any remains of these once-busy places, and I wasn't disappointed. Although it still pains me to see what little is still extant of Denison's railroad past, it is fascinating to uncover its ruins.
