The History of Colleyville, Texas

Dr. Lilburn Howard Colley, a Missouri native who had served in the Union Army before earning his medical degree, moved to Texas in 1880 and settled in a little community called Bransford in northeast Tarrant County. He practiced medicine in the area for four decades, riding out to the surrounding farms, and became the figure who tied the scattered settlements together. In 1914, when Walter Couch opened a grocery store near Dr. Colley's home, the community around it was renamed Colleyville in the doctor's honor — a rare case of a town named not for a founder or a railroad man, but for the person who'd cared for its people.

For decades this was deep country — Colleyville reported a population of just twenty-five in 1936, with two businesses. What finally made it a city was the postwar era and the same annexation pressures that were reshaping the whole mid-cities region. In 1956 several small parent communities — Bransford, Pleasant Run, Pleasant Glade, Spring Garden, Red Rock, and Glen Hope — banded together and incorporated as the City of Colleyville on January 10. It was still tiny, barely 100 people by 1958, a rural town that had chosen to become a municipality.

Once incorporated, Colleyville grew steadily — then dramatically — as northeast Tarrant County became prime territory for affluent professionals. From under 1,500 residents in 1964, it added thousands a decade, passing 12,000 by 1990 and continuing to climb. Large lots, wooded neighborhoods, and top-rated schools turned the old doctor's country town into one of the wealthiest and most exclusive suburbs in the Dallas–Fort Worth area — an estate-and-equestrian enclave a long way from its farm-community roots.