The History of Farmers Branch, Texas

Thomas Keenan, Isaac Webb, and William Cochran all arrived in 1842 and took original land grants where Farmers Branch now sits. By 1843 they'd founded a community called Mustang Branch, named for the wild Mustang grapes growing along the creek. Cochran later changed the name to Farmers Branch, in a nod to the area's rich farmland. This was no ordinary settlement: in 1845 Farmers Branch became the site of the first office of the Peters Colony — the empresario company recruiting settlers to North Texas — and its advertising made Farmers Branch the most famous Dallas County town of the decade, its name known across the United States and Europe. Isaac Webb founded the first formal church in Dallas County here in 1845.

For the next century Farmers Branch settled into life as a small farming community just northwest of Dallas — productive, quiet, and increasingly overshadowed as Dallas boomed beside it. The rich soil that gave the town its name kept the farms going, but the metropolis next door was the story of the era. Farmers Branch didn't formally incorporate as a city until 1946, when Bill Dodson became its first mayor and the postwar suburban wave began to arrive.

As it filled in as an inner-ring suburb, Farmers Branch made a deliberate choice to invest in green space, and it became known as the 'City in a Park' — home to more than thirty award-winning parks, rose gardens, and trails. Its historical park preserves 19th-century structures as a link to those 1840s founding days. Sitting inside Loop 635 with a dense corporate and industrial base beside all those parks, Farmers Branch is a rare thing: one of the oldest settlements in the county and a modern, park-laced suburb at the same time.