BUCKNER, TEXAS (Collin County). Buckner, the original county seat of Collin County, was three miles northwest of the site of present McKinney. Settlement began in the early 1840s when John McGarrah arrived from Arkansas to claim a headright of 640 acres. McGarrah opened a trading post to serve the growing number of settlers who began to arrive in the area in the mid-1840s and donated fifty acres of land for a townsite. Later a blacksmith shop was built near the store. On April 3, 1846, the Texas legislature established Collin County and appointed a five-member commission to select two sites within three miles of the center of the county and to supervise an election to choose one of the sites as the county seat, to be called Buckner. On July 4, 1846, about seventy-five persons attended a meeting, probably held at McGarrah's store, and selected that site as the county seat. In 1846 the town received a post office. Because two sites had not been offered to the voters in the election of 1846, and because Buckner was not within three miles of the center of the county, the state legislature called for a new election in 1848. McKinney, three miles southeast of Buckner, was chosen as the new county seat. In May 1848 mail to Buckner was discontinued, and within a year its residents and businesses had moved to McKinney. By the early 1850s the first county seat of Collin County was deserted. In the 1980s, however, activity resumed in the Buckner area, under the influence of a "Third Monday Trade Day" at the site and a nearby Texas Instruments plant.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roy Franklin Hall and Helen Gibbard Hall, Collin County: Pioneering in North Texas (Quanah, Texas: Nortex, 1975). Dick King, Ghost Towns of Texas (San Antonio: Naylor, 1953). J. Lee and Lillian J. Stambaugh, A History of Collin County (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1958).
