The reason Anna exists in the first place has nothing to do with commuting to Dallas. The Houston and Texas Central Railway laid track through this stretch of Collin County in the 1870s and 80s, and the depot that went up in 1885 wasn’t built to move people — it was built to move cotton, grain, and other agricultural goods off the Blackland Prairie and toward markets that couldn’t be reached any other way at the time. For most of the century that followed, that was Anna’s entire economic identity: a small rail stop serving the farms spread across the surrounding black gumbo clay, soil that happens to be some of the most productive farmland in North Texas precisely because of the same expansive clay that gives foundation contractors so much business today.
That identity held for generations. The population stayed small enough that everyone had some connection to the surrounding farmland, whether they worked it directly or just knew the families who did. It’s a very different town today. The population estimate hit 35,245 by 2025, up from fewer than 17,000 just five years earlier, and virtually all of that growth arrived as subdivisions built on what used to be working farmland. Fields that grew cotton and grain for a century are now cul-de-sacs, and the pace shows no sign of slowing.
The one big project trying to keep a working farm in the picture
Not every acre is disappearing quietly into rooftops. Sherley Farms, a roughly 970-acre, $1.5 billion community breaking ground in 2026 about five minutes from US-75 near downtown, is planned around an unusual anchor for a modern subdivision: a 65-acre working organic farm at its center, rather than the golf course or clubhouse a development this size might otherwise build around. The community is named for one of Anna’s founding families, tying the project’s identity directly back to the agricultural history it’s built on top of. Whether a 65-acre working farm inside a planned community of roughly 3,000 homes ends up functioning as a genuine working farm or largely as a scenic amenity remains to be seen, but it’s a notably different approach than simply paving over the last of the farmland and calling it done.
What’s actually left
Drive far enough out from Anna’s built-up core and working agriculture is still visible, though shrinking year over year as more land gets optioned for the next subdivision. The economics are straightforward and not unique to Anna: land zoned or rezoned for residential development is worth dramatically more per acre than land used for row crops, and a farming family sitting on generations-old land near a fast-growing suburb faces a financial decision that a lot of small towns across this part of Texas have faced before Anna did.
What makes Anna’s version of that story slightly different is the timeline. Towns like Frisco and McKinney went through this same transition decades ago, and their agricultural pasts are now mostly museum exhibits and street names. Anna is going through it in real time, fast enough that residents who moved here for the small-town feel are watching the working landscape around them change within a single decade rather than reading about it as history. The depot that once existed purely to ship the harvest out now sits as a preserved landmark in Sherley Heritage Park, a fitting enough symbol of a town whose original economic reason for being has almost entirely given way to the reason people move here today.
