Wilmer, Texas: Named for the Man Who Punched the Tickets

Settlement at what is now Wilmer, Texas began before eighteen fifty, when the original land patent holder Andrew K. Gray arrived in Dallas County. When the Houston and Texas Central Railroad arrived in eighteen seventy-two, the stop was called Prairie Valley.

In eighteen eighty-four the post office was renamed Wilmer, after A. J. Wilmer, a conductor on the Houston and Texas Central who regularly passed through town on his runs.

The town was incorporated in nineteen forty-five, primarily to build a public water system, with a population of four hundred fifty people in a hundred and thirty-six homes. It sits at the junction of Interstate Forty-Five and United States Highway Seventy-Five, fourteen miles southeast of downtown Dallas, and has grown as the southern Dallas County warehouse corridor has expanded.