Grayson County Texas map
33.63° N · 96.68° W · County seat: Sherman · 979 sq mi
Grayson County is the Texas half of Texoma. Its northern boundary is the Red River, dammed at Denison in 1944 to make Lake Texoma, and its twin cities of Sherman and Denison sit 10 miles apart on US-75, the last Texas exits before Oklahoma.
Centered on Grayson County. The pin marks Sherman; Lake Texoma fills the northwest corner along the Red River.
Where Grayson County is
The county occupies a 30-mile stretch of the Red River about 60 miles north of Dallas. Three Oklahoma counties face it across the water — Love to the northwest, Marshall to the north and Bryan to the northeast — and none of them is reachable without a bridge. On the Texas side, Fannin County is east, Collin County south, Denton County southwest and Cooke County west.
Grayson was carved out of Fannin County in 1846, in the first wave of counties organized after statehood, and named for Peter Wagener Grayson, an attorney general of the Republic of Texas. Of its 979 square miles, 46 are water, nearly all of it Lake Texoma.
The county is its own metropolitan area — Sherman–Denison — and also counts inside the Dallas–Fort Worth combined statistical area. McKinney is 30 miles south, Frisco 34 miles south and Denton 39 miles southwest. Central Time; 4th congressional district.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Sherman (county seat) | City | 43,671 |
| Denison | City | 24,459 |
| Van Alstyne (part) | City | 4,399 |
| Whitesboro | City | 4,069 |
| Howe | Town | 3,615 |
| Pottsboro | Town | 2,488 |
| Gunter | City | 2,060 |
| Collinsville | Town | 1,871 |
| Whitewright (part) | Town | 1,716 |
| Bells | Town | 1,521 |
| Tioga | Town | 1,144 |
| Southmayd | City | 984 |
| Tom Bean | City | 920 |
| Knollwood | City | 765 |
Van Alstyne extends into Collin County and Whitewright into Fannin County; the figures above count only the Grayson County part.
Roads
- U.S. 75 – the spine of the county, four to six lanes from the Collin County line north through Van Alstyne, Howe, Sherman and Denison, then across the Red River to Durant, Oklahoma.
- U.S. 82 – the east–west route, from Whitesboro through Sherman to Bonham in Fannin County. It runs as a freeway across the middle of the county.
- U.S. 69 – enters from the southeast through Bells, joins US-75 at Denison and crosses into Oklahoma with it.
- U.S. 377 – the western route through Tioga and Whitesboro, south toward Pilot Point and Denton.
- SH-289 – Preston Road, the old trail route north from Frisco and Gunter to Preston Bend on Lake Texoma.
- SH-91 – runs north out of Denison to the Denison Dam and across it into Oklahoma.
- SH-56 – parallels US-82 to the south, linking Whitesboro, Sherman and Bonham.
- SH-5, SH-11 and SH-160 – the county's farm-town connectors between Sherman, Van Alstyne, Tom Bean and Collinsville.
Lake Texoma and the Denison Dam
The Army Corps of Engineers closed the Denison Dam across the Red River in 1944, for flood control and hydropower, and the pool behind it backed up over both the Red and the Washita to become one of the largest reservoirs in the country. The state line runs down the middle of the lake, so a boat crossing the Big Mineral Arm changes jurisdictions; Texas and Oklahoma sell a joint fishing license for it. Striped bass reproduce naturally in Texoma, which is uncommon in inland U.S. lakes.
Eisenhower State Park sits on the Texas shore just west of the dam, on bluffs above the water. West of Pottsboro, the Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge covers the Big Mineral Arm's mudflats and marsh and is a wintering stop for geese and cranes on the Central Flyway.
Sherman, Denison and the fabs
Sherman is the older of the twin cities and the seat of government; Denison grew up in 1872 as a railroad town where the Missouri–Kansas–Texas line crossed the Red River. Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in Denison in 1890, in a frame house near the tracks that is now a state historic site.
Austin College, a private liberal arts college chartered in 1849, has been in Sherman since 1876 and is the oldest college in Texas still operating under its original charter. Grayson College, the two-year public college, is between the two cities near Denison.
The county's newer industry is semiconductors. Sherman already produced silicon wafers and optical components, and Texas Instruments has been building a large 300-millimeter wafer plant on the north side of town — the reason for much of the county's growth between the 2020 census and the Census Bureau's 2024 estimate of about 150,500 residents.