The Best-Kept Square in Texas

Carrollton hides one of the prettiest old downtowns in North Texas — a compact square of brick storefronts so photogenic that film and television crews keep turning up to use it. But the square is only the latest chapter. The town's deeper story belongs to the Perry family, Illinois pioneers who joined the Peters Colony in the 1840s, built a homestead on the prairie, and gave land for a church, a cemetery, a school, and the railroad that made the town possible. This walking loop pairs the founding Perry homestead and museum with the cemetery and church the family endowed, then ends on the cinematic square downtown. It's a short walk from a pre-Civil War farmhouse to a movie-ready Main Street — the whole arc of a Texas town in a couple of miles.