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.
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.
