One town made from two — a North Texas city that started as a feud between two railroad camps and got its name from a man who'd never been to Texas. Garland sits on the Blackland prairie northeast of Dallas, where two railroads once built rival depots a mile apart and the towns around them, Duck Creek and Embree, fought for years over which would win. In 1887 a congressman ended it by dropping a post office on neutral ground between them and calling the new town Garland. Cotton, onions on the rail line, and Texas hats since — this page tells the story.
Garland keeps its founding contradiction in plain sight. The creek and the old name Duck Creek are still on the map; the rail lines that started the fight still run through town; and the downtown square sits roughly where the compromise put it, between where the two depots stood. It's a city built by burying the hatchet — cotton money and onion-rail traffic in its early decades, hat-making and manufacturing later, and the long northeast sprawl of the Dallas Metroplex around it in the twentieth century. For a place named after a stranger, Garland made the name its own.
Why People Visit Garland Texas
- Stroll the historic downtown square and the restored Plaza Theatre (1941).
- Get out on Lake Ray Hubbard for boating, sailing, and shoreline parks.
- Walk the old-growth bottomland of Spring Creek Forest Preserve.
- Ride the wooded singletrack at Rowlett Creek Preserve.
- Shop and gather at Firewheel Town Center and the downtown events on the square.
