History of Sherman

General Sidney Sherman

The pioneers who founded Sherman were men of individual enterprise; they hitched a yoke of oxen to a pecan tree and dragged out the streets, flung a bearskin over a tree stump and called it a pulpit and used the pockets of an old coat hanging on the public square as the first bank and post office.

The City of Sherman was born on March 17, 1846 when the First Texas Legislature cut off a part of Fannin County, named the area Grayson County for Peter Grayson, Texas statesman, and called the county seat Sherman for General Sidney Sherman, cavalry officer who is famous for coining the phrase "Remember the Alamo!"

The town grew in the next two years and had a log courthouse and a public well. It soon spread over the 80-acre townsite and was made up of log cabins with no window panes, walnut lumber export, courage, buffalo hides, ambition, cotton, wheat, cows, oil, a tinge of the Old South, much of the New West, elbow grease, family pride and love.

When the town was incorporated in 1848, it had a union church and school, a newspaper (or two at times), a community fair, stores, saloons a plenty, even a dramatics group and mudholes in the streets that could be seen by the new gas lights. The town had contact with the outside world through the galloping teams of the Butterfield Trail Overland Mail.

After the strife-ridden and bloody 1860s, farms were run-down, there was little money and no industry. But, through all of this, cattle were plentiful and the big drives North began. Hunters from the plains to the West came to the Sherman square to sell their profitable buffalo hides as crafts multiplied and trade flourished. Soon farming recovered, wheat and cotton buyers flooded the town and new mills and brick yards, a candy factory, tannery and iron foundry soon made Sherman their home.

The railroad came in the 1870s along with new banks, another college, the handsomest hotel in the state and an opera house. In 1875 two fires leveled the wooden section of the business district and 40 new brick buildings went up within the year.

Sherman had no boom, no bust, just steady go-ahead. By 1915, it had adopted a new city charter that put the town under a city manager-commission government, one of the earliest in the state. The middle 1920s found Sherman with 54 industries, strong schools and colleges, its own municipal airport and a tag, "Fifth Industrial City of Texas."

World War II brought Perrin Air Force Base as a part of the life and economy. Sherman was backed by a pool of urban-rural labor when industrial dispersion moved South and industry wages sparked commerce. The discovery of oil in the 1950s put a glitter on bank accounts.

Perrin Air Force Base changed to a county airport and industrial park in the late 1960s and early 1970s and Sherman industries flourished and began bringing in new names.

The dedicated men and women of Sherman are determined that Sherman will continue to grow and prosper, offering a quality of life that is among the best in the United States. It is a community with a proud history and a promising future.

For more history information on Grayson County please CLICK HERE.