Carrollton incorporated as a city in 1913, with W.F. Vinson as its first mayor, and for decades stayed a small farming-and-rail town — a working cattle ranch survived inside the city limits as late as 1983. Then the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex grew out to meet it. The Sun Belt boom of the 1950s through the 1980s filled the prairie with neighborhoods, and Carrollton became the three-county suburb it is now, spread across Dallas, Denton, and Collin counties northwest of downtown Dallas. The DART Green Line and Trinity Mills Station arrived in 2010, tying the old rail town back into the region's rails — carrying passengers this time, not cotton.
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.
