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.
The land came first, and it was extraordinary land — the Blackland Prairie, a belt of deep black waxy soil that made some of the finest cotton country in America. Settlers of the Peters Colony began arriving around 1850, and by 1854 the little community of Duck Creek, named for the stream that still runs through the city, had its own post office. The village that grew up in the 1870s was pure Blackland Texas: cotton gins, gristmills, churches, and farm families working ground so rich it turned the region into the cotton heart of North 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.
