The graveyard that survived a church, a highway and a mall
Baccus Cemetery in Plano began in 1847 when Henry Cook, a War of 1812 veteran and Peters Colony settler, buried his son Daniel on his own land. Rachel Cook Baccus later deeded it to the family and gave it her name. It still receives burials, having outlasted the church built beside it and the malls and highways built around it.
A veteran buried his son and started a cemetery
Henry Cook was a veteran of the War of 1812. In 1845 he settled here as a member of the Peters Colony, a land-grant scheme that brought thousands of families into North Texas. His log house stood nearby. It was a landmark on the Shawnee Trail, the cattle route that ran north out of Texas.
In 1847 Cook buried his son Daniel here. Daniel had been born in 1831. He died young, and his father chose this patch of family land to bury him. That single grave was the start of what is now the 1.1 kilometers.
A daughter gave the burial ground its name
Rachel Cook Baccus, Henry's daughter, inherited the plot. In 1878 she deeded the burial ground to her father's heirs, making the family cemetery a shared trust rather than one man's land. She later went further and gave adjoining ground for a new building, the Baccus Christian Church Sanctuary.
The cemetery took her name sometime around 1915. The church she built beside it did not last as long as she had. It disbanded in the 1930s, its congregation scattered or folded into other parishes. The building went with it. The cemetery she had signed over in 1878 kept taking burials anyway, and still does.
JCPenney's old land became a $2 billion district
JCPenney bought 240 acres near here in 1987. It moved its headquarters to Texas from New York City. The land around the new offices sat empty for almost three decades. In 2014 the company agreed to let developers build on it. Legacy West rose in its place. It was a $2 billion district of shops, offices and apartments. Toyota Motor Corporation moved its North American headquarters here from Torrance, California. The new development drew them before the concrete had even set. The shopping district opened to the public on June 2, 2017. Texas's Secretary of State and Plano's mayor cut the ribbon.
A delayed bus station finally opened nearby
A bus station a half mile from here was first proposed in 2000. It was called Westside Park & Ride. The recession that followed the dot-com crash put it on hold. Construction did not start again until 2010. The station finally opened as the Northwest Plano Park & Ride on July 30, 2012. It cost $12.5 million. It charged a daily parking fee to riders from outside the transit system. That fee was dropped in 2014. New shuttle programs kept getting added for years afterward. A Frisco microtransit service arrived as late as 2026.
Two science fiction writers ended their partnership here
L. Sprague de Camp wrote science fiction and fantasy for most of the twentieth century. He was born in 1907 and died in Plano in 2000. His wife, Catherine Crook de Camp, wrote alongside him for decades. She died the same year he did. Both of them ended their long working partnership on the same ground that has held the town's dead since 1847.
The cemetery Henry Cook started for one son still takes the town's dead, a mile from the tollway and the food hall.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.