Mantua: Collin County's Ghost Town

Before there was an Anna, there was Mantua. In 1854 a handful of north Collin County leaders — including William C. McKinney and the Throckmorton brothers — laid out a forty-eight-block town around a square, built to support a seminary and kept respectable by deeds that banned gambling, racing, and liquor. For a while it worked: a Masonic lodge, a post office, churches, and a school that drew dozens of pupils. Then in 1872 the Houston & Texas Central Railroad ran its tracks a mile and a half to the east, and Mantua emptied almost overnight as its people and businesses chased the rails. The new town of Anna grew up along those tracks instead. This driving loop traces the ghost town and its cemetery, the nearby homestead of Declaration-of-Independence signer Collin McKinney, and the square in Anna that inherited what Mantua left behind.