The town is located on Sesquehanna sandy loam that is surrounded by Norfolk sand and the Orangeburg gravelly sandy loam extending over the area. Throughout the farm and ranch section there are many streams with rich Meadow and Wilson soil. Franklin is a market center for the entire southeastern quarter of Robertson county, encompassing several rural communities and settlements.

Franklin came into existence in 1880; however, there was a small town, Morgan, at its present location a decade before, and the vicinity was considered a part of "Old Franklin" as early as 1838, when the wilderness village was the seat of a vast county under the Republic of Texas. The history of the community is interwoven in the story of early settlement in the Robertson Colony and there are residents of the town who trace their ancestry to families that came to the area before the Texas Revolution.

Like the accounts of other places, the history of Franklin starts with the first ownership of land in the area of its general location. Hugh Henry received a league grant south of the present town in December, 1834; Skeaugh Walker settled westward in July, 1835; Stephen H. Eaton lived to the south in December, 1835; and there is evidence Britton Dawson lived near the present townsite as early as 1833.

Huge sections of the land southeast of Franklin were originally granted to Jose Maria Viesca, a former Governor of the State of Coahuila and Texas, and to Pedro Pereira Jose de Jesus who possessed great sections in joint-ownership with Mariano Grande. After 1836, Edward McMillan moved to a section west of present Franklin and Francis Slauter, the first to own the land on which Franklin is built, was the leading citizen of the area after the Revolution.

In 1872, the International Railway Company completed a segment of its lines between Hearne and the Navasota River and a number of villages developed along its right-of-way. One such village was Morgan, named for a railway official, and another was Englewood; Morgan lay on the present site of Franklin and Englewood was two miles to the east.

The railroad changed rural living in many ways. In a short time there were sixty families living at Morgan and an equal number at Englewood. Morgan was a railroad town and its residents were railroad workers and farmers. There was a depot, water station, a platform for split and cut logs that supplied fuel for the train, and there were three small stores.

In that time, the Texas Land Company owned much of the land along the International lines. Their officials had made many surveys, and when it was determined that the place was near the geographic center of the county several families moved to the area to build homes. Between 1872 and 1879, the population of the village increased to approximately two hundred residents.