What changed it were the schools. In 1890 the Texas Normal College — today the University of North Texas, one of the largest universities in the state — opened its doors, and in 1901 the Girls' Industrial College, now Texas Woman's University, followed. Two universities in a town this size set the tempo: tens of thousands of students, a year-round calendar of concerts and games and festivals, and a downtown that has been a college town's downtown for well over a century. UNT's music school alone grew into one of the largest in the nation.
Denton sits at the northern apex of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, where Interstate 35 splits to run toward the two big cities. Denton County was carved out in 1846 and named for John B. Denton, a frontier preacher and lawyer killed on the prairie in 1841; in 1857 the new county seat took the same name and was laid out around a central square. For its first decades Denton was a North Texas farm-and-trade town — a county seat on the blackland prairie — until the railroad arrived in the 1880s and the colleges came in the 1890s and changed everything.
Why People Visit Denton
Denton offers the energy of a music town and the ease of a small Texas city — a beautiful courthouse square, a deep live-music calendar, two universities, and a creative streak that earned it the nickname “Little Austin.” It's walkable, friendly, and unmistakably North Texas.
