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.
Modern Carrollton is also one of the most Korean cities in Texas. Along Old Denton Road and through the north Dallas suburbs, a large Korean-American community has built groceries, bakeries, and barbecue restaurants thick enough that the area is sometimes called a hidden Koreatown — and in 2010 the city gave that everyday connection official shape by becoming a sister city of Guri, South Korea, just east of Seoul. The Festival at the Switchyard, begun the same year, brings the whole town back to the Square and the old rail yard each fall. A frontier farm town named twice-over for a Maryland signer now throws a street festival in the shadow of its grain silos, in one of the most diverse suburbs in North Texas.
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.
