Sanger: Named for a Family of Stores

In eighteen eighty-six, the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway needed water stops every few miles to keep its steam engines running on the push north through Denton County. At milepost three ninety-two, the railroad chose a spot on the open prairie and named it Sanger, in honor of a family who ran department stores in Waco and Dallas and were among the railroad's valued customers. The F.

M. Ready family became the first settlers in October eighteen eighty-seven, the same month the first engine and caboose rolled through. Cattle ranchers drove herds through town to northern markets, and wheat farming filled the freight cars heading south.

Today Sanger sits twenty miles north of Denton on Interstate Thirty-Five, a community of around ten thousand still defined by the same agricultural prairie that drew the railroad through here almost one hundred forty years ago.