What turned a farm district into a town was the railroad — three of them, really. The Dallas & Wichita line reached Carrollton and a post office opened in 1878; Jay Gould bought the unfinished road and pushed it to Denton in 1880, and it became the Missouri, Kansas & Texas — the 'Katy.' Then, in 1888, the Cotton Belt line crossed the Katy right at Carrollton, and that crossing made the place. A town that shipped its neighbors' cotton, cottonseed, grain, and livestock grew up in the angle of the rails, soon outpacing the older mill settlement of Trinity Mills to the north. The Historic Downtown Square took shape along Belt Line Road, and it is still the heart of the old town.
Those first families — the Larners, the Furneaux, the Perrys, and a cluster of other English-rooted households sometimes called the 'English colony' — were after the same thing: the headrights the Peters Colony offered to anyone who would settle and improve the land. They found flat Blackland Prairie near the Elm Fork of the Trinity, good for cotton, corn, and grain, and they got to work. David Myers, also from Illinois, organized the first Baptist church in Dallas County in 1846; a community school followed around 1856 at the Union Baptist Church. For its first forty years Carrollton was a scattering of farms, gins, and mills, with a population you could count in the low hundreds.
Why People Visit Carrollton
Visitors come to Carrollton for the old railroad town inside the modern suburb — the Square, the silos, and the Switchyard — and stay for the food, the parks, and the easy reach of the whole Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. It is equal parts Texas heritage and present-day diversity, with vintage storefronts on one block and Korean bakeries on the next. Welcoming and well-connected, Carrollton rewards anyone curious about how a North Texas farm town became a three-county suburb without losing its center.
