The most Carrollton thing on the skyline came with that shipping trade: the tall concrete grain-elevator silos that still ring the east side of the Square. Built to hold the grain the trains hauled in and out, the cylindrical complex outlasted the farms it served and became the town's accidental monument — a piece of industrial Texas standing over a square of vintage storefronts. In recent years the city has begun turning the silos into public art and a gateway for rail riders, so the structure that once measured the harvest now greets the commuter. Few suburbs keep a landmark so plainly honest about where their money first came from.
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.
