About Mansfield, Texas

Mansfield is a suburban city in the U.S. state of Texas, and is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex area. The city is located mostly in Tarrant county, with small parts in Ellis and Johnson counties. Its location is approximately 30 miles from Dallas and 20 miles from Fort Worth, and is adjacent to Arlington. As of the 2010 census, the population was 56,368, up from 28,031 in 2000. The estimated population in 2020 is 73,550.

The first wave of European settlers arrived in the rolling Cross Timbers country of north central Texas in the 1840s. Primarily of Scotch-Irish origins, these pioneer farmers came for the most part from southern states, following the frontier as it shifted west of the Mississippi. They entered an area where Native Americans had been living for thousands of years. The Comanche posed a serious threat to the settlers, and in 1849, the U.S. Army established Fort Worth to protect the farms along the sparsely populated frontier.

The area southeast of the fort (and of the Trinity River) was well protected and presumably fairly well settled by the early 1850s. In one well-documented case, eight related families migrated to the area in 1853 from Illinois. Three of the four Gibson brothers in this group established homesteads about 4 miles (6 km) northwest of present-day Mansfield. This settlement, which became known as the Gibson Community, included a school and a church building by 1860.