Garland is one town made from two — a Dallas County city on the old Blackland Prairie, fifteen miles northeast of downtown Dallas, that began its life as a pair of feuding railroad camps glaring at each other across a mile of black dirt. Today it is one of the largest cities in Texas: a manufacturing powerhouse of the Metroplex, home to one of the most diverse communities in the state, with Lake Ray Hubbard on its eastern shore and a square downtown that remembers where it all started. One post office, two stubborn towns, and a name nobody could argue with — that is Garland.
The twentieth century turned the farm town into an industrial one. Manufacturing put down roots — Resistol, the famous Western hat maker, among the plants that made Garland a byword for Texas industry — and the city diversified into electronics, food processing, chemicals, and instruments, building one of the larger industrial bases in North Texas. The Plaza Theatre rose on the downtown square in 1941 and still anchors it, restored and busy; the postwar Metroplex boom did the rest, carrying Garland from a courthouse-square cotton town to one of the largest cities in Texas.
Why People Visit Garland Texas
People come to Garland for its easy place in the Metroplex — a historic square and a real founding story, lake recreation on Ray Hubbard, and green preserves — all minutes northeast of Dallas. It's practical, green, and neighborly: the town that two railroads accidentally built.
