Travis College Hill Addition
Garland, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Between 1910 and 1920, the population of Garland increased from about 800 to more than 1,400. Accompanying the growth of the town was a plan by the Eastern Texas Traction Company to build an interurban electric trolley line. The route, connecting Dallas to Greenville, would have run along Mewshaw Avenue (later Avenue D), as the southern border of the Travis College Hill Addition, which was platted in 1913. The neighborhood was created as an addition to the interurban line developments, in part, to attract commerce and population near the line. The 73-acre property belonged to Garland pioneers Richard and Sallie (Walker) Wyatt. Developer R.O. Travis worked with Richard Wyatt to oversee the establishment of the addition through the Interurban Land Company. The neighborhood adjoined Garland College, giving the residential addition the name of Interurban Land Company's Travis College Hill. Large lots and proximity to the proposed trolley line helped attract businesses and homeowners. At the center of the addition was the Garland Avenue Thoroughfare, now South 11th Street. The interurban line was cancelled due to the bankruptcy of the Eastern Texas Traction Company, and the chance to renew the project was lost with the coming of World War I and the Model T automobile. However, the area had already become an integral part of Garland, and has featured the homes of many of the city's civic, religious, commercial and educational leaders. The houses have also been used for numerous meetings and events as Garland has grown from a small town to a large city. Today, Travis College Hill Addition reflects the architecture and history of the early development of Garland. (2015)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As Garland's population nearly doubled between 1910 and 1920, developers platted the Travis College Hill Addition in 1913, betting on a planned interurban electric trolley line that would connect Dallas to Greenville along the neighborhood's edge. Built on 73 acres of pioneer Wyatt family land beside Garland College, the addition offered large lots meant to draw commerce and homeowners near the coming rail line. The trolley never came—killed by the traction company's bankruptcy, World War I, and the rise of the Model T—but the neighborhood flourished anyway, becoming home to many of Garland's leaders.
Why it matters
Travis College Hill captures the interurban-trolley boom that shaped early-twentieth-century suburban development, and how the automobile quietly rewrote the future of American towns.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years just before World War I, the little town of Garland, Texas, was doing what hundreds of American towns did in that hopeful era: growing fast and betting on the future. Between 1910 and 1920 its population nearly doubled, from around 800 to more than 1,400. That may sound modest today, but in a farming community on the Blackland Prairie east of Dallas, it felt like a boom.
The engine of that optimism was electricity on rails. The interurban—an electric trolley that ran between towns rather than just within them—was the era's cutting-edge transportation. Across the country, and especially thickly across Texas, promoters were stringing overhead wires and laying track to knit small towns to big cities. A farmer or a clerk could imagine living in Garland and reaching Dallas or Greenville in comfort, without a horse or a rutted road.
It was a moment when land, transportation, and ambition all moved together. Where a line was planned, developers platted neighborhoods; where neighborhoods rose, they promised commerce and respectability. The Travis College Hill Addition, laid out in 1913, was born squarely inside that logic.
People & events
The land itself belonged to Garland pioneers Richard and Sallie Walker Wyatt—a family whose 73 acres would become the canvas for a planned neighborhood. When the Eastern Texas Traction Company announced a route to connect Dallas and Greenville, running along what was then Mewshaw Avenue, the Wyatts' acreage suddenly sat beside the future.
Developer R.O. Travis saw the opportunity and worked with Richard Wyatt through the Interurban Land Company to turn farmland into an addition. They platted large, generous lots—the kind meant to attract not just homeowners but businesses drawn to the coming rail line. Because the tract adjoined Garland College, the neighborhood took the name Travis College Hill, joining the developer, the school, and the promise of the trolley into a single hopeful title. At its heart ran the Garland Avenue Thoroughfare, the spine we now call South 11th Street.
Then the future the whole plan rested on simply evaporated. The Eastern Texas Traction Company went bankrupt, and the trolley line was cancelled. The coming of World War I closed the window to revive it, and a quieter revolution finished the job: the Model T. Affordable automobiles made the interurban's whole premise obsolete before its wires ever hummed over Travis College Hill.
Its place in the American story
The story of Travis College Hill is, in miniature, the story of how America decided to move. For a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, the electric interurban looked like the shape of the future—clean, fast, and binding town to town. Communities everywhere planned their growth around lines that, in many cases, were never finished or barely survived.
What killed them was not failure of imagination but the automobile. The Model T put personal mobility within reach of ordinary families, and once people could drive themselves anywhere, on their own schedule, the logic of fixed rail between small towns collapsed. Neighborhoods platted to feed trolley stops found themselves feeding driveways and garages instead.
Yet the neighborhoods often outlived the dream that created them, and that is the quiet lesson here. The trolley never came, but the addition thrived anyway, filling with the homes of Garland's civic, religious, commercial, and educational leaders and hosting the meetings and gatherings of a growing city. A speculative bet on a vanished technology became, instead, a durable piece of a real community.
If you visit
Walk or drive along South 11th Street and you are following the old Garland Avenue Thoroughfare—the deliberate central spine of a neighborhood laid out more than a century ago. Notice the lots: they run large and gracious by design, a developer's promise to buyers that this was a place with room to breathe.
Let your eye read the houses as a timeline. Because the addition filled in over decades, you can trace the changing tastes of early-twentieth-century Texas in the rooflines, porches, and details from one block to the next. This was the address of choice for many of Garland's leading families, and that pride still shows in the care the homes have been given.
It makes a rewarding stop on a Dallas-area history road trip, especially paired with Garland's older downtown just to the north. Stand at the neighborhood's southern edge, along the former Mewshaw Avenue, and picture the electric trolley that was supposed to glide past here on its way from Dallas to Greenville. The wires never went up—but the neighborhood they were meant to serve is very much still here, which is its own kind of history worth seeing.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · R.O. Travis
- · Richard Wyatt
- · Sallie Wyatt
Themes & tags
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