Dido

SAGINAW, TEXAS . Saginaw is a commercial and residential city on State Highway 496 ten miles northwest of Fort Worth in north central Tarrant County. The area was settled before the Civil War and the small agricultural settlement that developed there was called Dido. In the 1880s three rail lines built through the area: the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf; the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe; and the Fort Worth and Denver City. In 1882 the growing community was renamed Saginaw, for the Michigan hometown of J. J. Green, a local landowner. A post office opened there in 1888, and the community school enrolled thirty students during the 189697 term. Forty-three pupils were registered ten years later, when two teachers were employed. By 1926, the earliest year for which Saginaw population figures were available, the town had 103 residents. It continued to report this population through the next decade, and in 1936 it had eleven businesses. Also around 1936 the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company and the Globe Aircraft Company located in Saginaw. At that time the Burrus facility was the largest grain elevator in Texas and the second largest in the nation. Its first manager was W. Lee O'Daniel , later governor of Texas and a United States senator. By the 1950s Saginaw had become a residential suburb of Fort Worth. Saginaw had incorporated by the late 1950s, when it had a population of 561 and twenty-five businesses. By the late 1960s it reported 1,200 residents, and by 1976 it reported 3,450 residents and thirty-seven businesses. In 1990 Saginaw had a population of 8,551. The population was 12,374 in 2000.