Prior to the first railroad arriving in 1880, the settlement of Greenville was a quiet little village without much commerce.  Building materials and trade goods had to be hauled by ox-drawn wagons from over 100 miles away.  Merchants had to send a courier on horseback to the nearest bank in Terrell for deposits and withdrawals.  Markets were so difficult to reach that only small quantities of agricultural products were exported from the small community.  According to the Greenville Banner, "business was dull in Greenville, the prospects looked gloomy and town lots could be bought for a song."

All of this changed with the arrival of the railroads.  The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway Company (MKT) contracted with a group of Greenville businessmen to extend their line from Denison to Greenville in February 1880.  Greenville boasted about 1100 residents at the time the first steam engine belched into town on October 1, 1880.  The population had risen to 4330 residents ten years later.  The cotton that was too expensive to ship by ox-drawn wagon became the county's major crop.  The few thousand bales of cotton shipped from Greenville in 1880 became ten thousand bales in 1881 and more than twenty thousand bales in 1982.  The booming town soon had a bank and a three-story brick hotel.

Photo by John B. Charles

The first MKT railway depot in Greenville was a wood frame building on the southwest corner of Lee and Wright streets shared with East Line and Red River Railroad.  In 1895, construction began on the permanent two-story brick depot which quickly became a city landmark and one of the busiest places in town.  Well-known politicians were greeted by their constituents at the Katy depot, including Harry Truman, who stopped at the Greenville station during his 1948 "whistle stop" campaign tour.  Celebrities, salesmen, merchants and ordinary citizens came and went via the Katy station for decades.

After many years of declining passenger loads, MKT passenger service to Greenville ended in 1965.  The last train left the Katy station on July 1, 1965 with no fanfare to mark the end of an era.  The tracks adjacent to the downtown depot building were unused until 1992, when the Dallas, Garland and Northeastern Railroad (DGNO) began freight operations.

This historical summary contains portions of an article written by Judy Woods.