Hats, Neon & the Square

Garland never planned to have a square. The town grew up where two railroads crossed in the 1880s, a tangle of feed stores and banks strung along the tracks — until a fire in 1899 wiped out twenty-eight of its thirty businesses and the survivors decided to rebuild around an open central block instead. Public-spirited citizens pooled their money, bought the vacant lots, and handed the city a public square. Then in 1927 a tornado tore through the same few blocks; the town buried its dead, turned a former bank on the square's corner into a memorial library, and rebuilt again. What's left today is a compact downtown stuffed with history: the Santa Fe depot that put the town on the map, a feed store and a filling station that fed the old Bankhead Highway, a 1941 movie house wearing one of the best neon signs in North Texas, and — a short hop away — the factory that has stamped 'Resistol' inside cowboy hats since before World War II. This walk loops the square and the depot block; the hat factory is a quick drive at the end. Look up: in Garland, the best details are above the storefronts.