Duncanville: The Town Named by a Railroad Foreman

Duncanville owes its existence to a switch. When the Chicago, Texas and Mexican Central Railway laid tracks through southern Dallas County in eighteen eighty, workers built a switching station here and named it Duncan Switch, after a line foreman. Charles Nance, appointed the community's first postmaster in eighteen eighty-two, applied for a post office under the name Duncan but was turned down because another Duncan already existed in Texas.

He simply added ville, and Duncanville it became. A fire in eighteen eighty-four destroyed most of the commercial buildings, but the town rebuilt. It remained a small rural community for decades, with a population still under four hundred in the nineteen thirties.

The real transformation came after World War Two, when Dallas began sprawling southward. Residents incorporated in nineteen forty-seven specifically to prevent annexation by Dallas, and Duncanville has grown into a city of more than forty thousand people.