COLLEYVILLE, TEXAS. Colleyville, previously known as Coleysville, is a suburb of Fort Worth on State Highway 26 in northeastern Tarrant County. In the 1990s it was bounded on the north by Southlake, on the west by Richland Hills and Hurst, on the east by Grapevine and Euless, and on the south by Bedford. The area was first settled in the 1850s, and the communities of Spring Garden, Pleasant Run, Pleasant Glade, and Red Rock (later Bransford) eventually developed in an area that is now within the city limits of Colleyville. Hilburn (or Lilburn) Howard Colley, a physician and a native of Missouri, moved to Texas in 1880 and settled in Bransford soon after. He practiced in the area for forty years. His name became associated with a community that grew up around a store founded in 1914 south of Bransford. The surrounding area gradually came to be known as Coleysville and, later, Colleyville. Though the St. Louis Southwestern Railway ran through the community, the primary reason for Colleyville's growth has been its proximity to Fort Worth, where most of its residents have been employed. The earliest reported population for Colleyville was twenty-five in 1936, when the town had two businesses; by 1945 its population had increased to forty. Colleyville was incorporated on January 10, 1956, and by 1958 a population of 100 was recorded there. By 1964 the city had 1,491 residents and thereafter continued to grow, for a time by about 3,000 residents a decade. The town in the early 1980s became divided over the issue of development, with one group wanting to limit new construction to expensive, single-family homes on large lots and the other group wanting smaller lots and multifamily housing. In 1990 the population of Colleyville was 12,724, and in 2000 it grew to 19,636.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Historic Resources Survey: Selected Tarrant County Communities (Fort Worth: Historic Preservation Council for Tarrant County, 1990). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.

John G. Johnson