United, the town grew on the rich black soil of the Blackland Belt. Cotton came first — gins, a roller flour mill, and the rail lines carrying the crop to market — and by the 1940s Garland had become a major onion-shipping point on the railroad. Industry followed: a cotton mill, then manufacturing, and a Texas cowboy-hat trade that made the city part of the state's hat-making story. Through the mid-twentieth century the Dallas boom rolled northeast and Garland turned from a farm-and-rail town into one of the largest cities in Texas — but the downtown square, the Plaza Theatre of 1941, and Duck Creek itself still mark where it began.
Garland keeps its founding contradiction in plain sight. The creek and the old name Duck Creek are still on the map; the rail lines that started the fight still run through town; and the downtown square sits roughly where the compromise put it, between where the two depots stood. It's a city built by burying the hatchet — cotton money and onion-rail traffic in its early decades, hat-making and manufacturing later, and the long northeast sprawl of the Dallas Metroplex around it in the twentieth century. For a place named after a stranger, Garland made the name its own.
Why People Visit Garland Texas
- Stroll the historic downtown square and the restored Plaza Theatre (1941).
- Get out on Lake Ray Hubbard for boating, sailing, and shoreline parks.
- Walk the old-growth bottomland of Spring Creek Forest Preserve.
- Ride the wooded singletrack at Rowlett Creek Preserve.
- Shop and gather at Firewheel Town Center and the downtown events on the square.
