The first settlement here was Duck Creek, a Peters Colony community on the creek that still runs through the city, with a post office by the 1850s. Then the railroads came. In 1886 the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas — the Katy — both bypassed old Duck Creek and built depots about a mile apart, and two rival towns sprang up beside them: Embree on the Santa Fe line, and a new Duck Creek on the Katy. The two fought hard — over the post office, over incorporation, over which would swallow the other. In 1887 Congressman Joseph Abbott settled it by moving the post office to neutral ground between the depots, and the new town took the name Garland, for U.S. Attorney General Augustus H. Garland. Garland incorporated in 1891.
United, the town grew on the rich black soil of the Blackland Belt. Cotton came first — gins, a roller flour mill, and the rail lines carrying the crop to market — and by the 1940s Garland had become a major onion-shipping point on the railroad. Industry followed: a cotton mill, then manufacturing, and a Texas cowboy-hat trade that made the city part of the state's hat-making story. Through the mid-twentieth century the Dallas boom rolled northeast and Garland turned from a farm-and-rail town into one of the largest cities in Texas — but the downtown square, the Plaza Theatre of 1941, and Duck Creek itself still mark where it began.
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.
