The north corridor

Where wire and reels are made

McKinney is home to Encore Wire, founded there in 1989 and now on a single 460-acre campus with just under 3.5 million sq ft under roof, making building wire and cable; Prysmian completed its acquisition of Encore Wire on 2 July 2024. Lone Star Reel builds plywood and nailed reels in McKinney and Bonham. In Denton, Madem-Moorecraft's plant of more than 200,000 sq ft makes wood and plywood reels and recycles wood reels, and it added a second nailed-reel line in February 2025. Few metro areas have cable and reels made this close together.

Encore Wire and reel take-back

Contractors across the corridor buy Encore Wire's building wire, and its reels are everywhere. We could find no published reel take-back program from Encore Wire, so contractors should plan to clear those reels themselves unless their supplier confirms a return arrangement in writing. We take them with any other reels. Our guide to Encore Wire reels explains what we checked.

Co-op country and growth

CoServ began in Denton in 1937 as Denton County Electric Cooperative and now serves more than 330,000 meters, much of it in the fast-growing suburbs along the corridor. New subdivisions, substations and feeders mean steady utility reels. Further north, Texas Instruments broke ground on 18 May 2022 on 300-mm wafer fabs in Sherman, with up to four fabs and about $30 billion of investment potential: years of construction with all the cable that implies.

Pickup notes for the north corridor

US-75 and I-35E are the spines, and both are busy at peak times. Sherman is a long run from the core, so pickups there are grouped onto dedicated trips; the larger the load, the easier it is to schedule. Rural sites west of Denton and around Sherman may have long gravel drives. Plant sites have their own gate procedures.

The reels we see most here

Wire and reel plants produce large, steady volumes of mixed reels: supplier reels, damaged returns and surplus. Subdivision builders and their electrical contractors in McKinney, Frisco, Prosper and Denton empty plywood and small nailed reels by the hundred over a development's life. CoServ and municipal utilities produce larger reels from feeders and substations. And construction at Sherman's fab sites produces everything from small control-cable reels to big power-cable drums.

A corridor still filling in

Much of the land along the north corridor was farmland within living memory, and some of it still is. That mix shows up in pickups: one day a reel stack at a brand-new distribution building off SH 121, the next a few rotten spools at a farm being sold for development. We handle both. Sites at the edge of town may be reachable only by gravel road; tell us, and we'll plan the truck.

Questions