Duck Creek to Garland: Founding a Town from Three

Garland is a city of three beginnings. In the 1840s and '50s, pioneers from the Peters Colony settled a farming community called Duck Creek, gathering in a log schoolhouse that doubled as church, lodge hall, and town center. Then the railroads arrived — the Santa Fe in 1886, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas right behind it — and both missed old Duck Creek by about a mile, drawing new towns to the tracks: Embree on one line, 'New Duck Creek' on the other. A post office named for U.S. Attorney General A. H. Garland finally fused the rivals into one incorporated town in 1891. This driving loop traces that founding story through the institutions the pioneers built before downtown existed: the neighborhood platted for the electric interurban, the schools that grew from the Duck Creek schoolhouse, the four oldest congregations (organized as early as 1855), the Masonic lodge chartered in 1875, and the two pioneer graveyards — one begun in a church yard, one begun with a settler's wife in 1854 — where the founders rest. Every stop is a Texas state marker. Drive it in order; the legs are short.