ST. PAUL, TEXAS (Collin County). St. Paul is on Farm Road 2514 and the shore of Lavon Lake, eleven miles south of McKinney in southern Collin County. It was named for the biblical evangelist Paul. In 1876 St. Paul had its own post office, and in 1890 it had thirty residents, a general store, a gristmill, and a cotton gin. Mail arrived three times a week. In 1894 the post office was withdrawn. A school had been started at the community before 1880 and was still operating in 1900. In the 1930s highway maps showed a school, a church, and scattered dwellings in the area. During the 1970s the town had a population of 150, and by the mid-1970s it had incorporated. It reported a population of 415 in 1990. In 2000 the population was 630.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roy Franklin Hall and Helen Gibbard Hall, Collin County: Pioneering in North Texas (Quanah, Texas: Nortex, 1975). J. Lee and Lillian J. Stambaugh, A History of Collin County (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1958). Fred Tarpley, Place Names of Northeast Texas (Commerce: East Texas State University, 1969).

Lisa C. Maxwell