White Settlement, Texas

The name White Settlement goes back to the eighteen forties, when this patch of prairie west of Fort Worth was the lone cluster of Anglo homesteads among several Native American villages. The area's Indian tribes reportedly gave the place that name themselves as a geographic marker. By the early eighteen fifties it referred to a handful of farms and a trading post or two.

Three brothers from Tennessee, Elijah, David, and Joseph Farmer, anchored the first real community here in the later part of that decade. The city incorporated in nineteen forty-one. Growth exploded the next decade when the Army activated Carswell Air Force Base nearby in nineteen forty-two.

Population topped ten thousand by the nineteen fifty census. The name has drawn controversy in recent years, but when a change to West Settlement went to voters in two thousand five, they rejected it and kept the name.