A historical marker commemorating a World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Princeton remains largely overlooked by visitors to a local community park. The site, now J.M. Caldwell Sr. Community Park, hosts youth baseball and soccer games on weekends, with families and spectators filling the grounds while the historical sign sits quietly beneath a nearby pavilion.
The marker indicates that the property briefly housed German prisoners of war in 1945. Before that period, the land served as a migrant labor camp established in 1940 to accommodate workers harvesting cotton and onions in the area. One of the few remaining physical remnants from that era is a rusted 30,000-gallon water tower located near the park.
Wylie is about 10 miles southeast of Allen.
The location of the marker, tucked away from the active sports fields, means that most people passing through the area do not see it. The rapid growth of Collin County has transformed the region, with new neighborhoods and increased traffic replacing the small farming communities of the past. This development has made many parts of the county unrecognizable compared to just a decade ago.
