CANNON, TEXAS. Cannon is at the junction of Farm roads 2729 and 121, twelve miles southeast of Sherman in southeastern Grayson County. Settlement of the community occurred in 1852, when Elijah Cannon, a native of Pickens County, South Carolina, built a gristmill and gin. Construction of a school, a church, and several businesses established the community as a center for area farmers in the 1870s. In 1876 John A. and Joseph L. Cobb founded the Centennial Institute, which burned in 1888. In 1877 a post office opened there. One source indicates that the town may have been called Canaan in its early history. Its population reached its peak in the mid-1880s, with some estimates placing the number of residents at 400. That same decade, however, saw the Houston and Texas Central Railway bypass Cannon. Over the next fifteen years the community's businesses declined and its population decreased. In 1907 the post office closed. Only thirty residents remained in Cannon by 1910. That figure increased slowly over the next few decades, reaching seventy-five by 1989; it remained at that number in 1990. In 2000 the population was fifty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dallas Morning News, November 10, 1936. Grayson County Frontier Village, History of Grayson County, Texas (2 vols., Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Hunter, 1979, 1981).
