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Business View Magazine
Bedford, Texas
In the heart of dallas/fort worth
Bedford is a suburban city located in northeast Tarrant
County, Texas, in the “Mid-Cities” area between Dallas
and Fort Worth. The area’s first settlers arrived in the
late 1840s, and a settlement developed in the 1870s,
after Weldon Bobo moved from Tennessee and estab-
lished a general store and gristmill to serve area farm-
ers. Bobo and a group of farmers agreed to name their
community Bedford, after the county in Tennessee
from which many of them had come.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Bedford was a booming town,
with a population between one and two thousand. But
its early prosperity ended in the early 1900s, when two
important rail lines, the Dallas-Fort Worth Interurban
and the Rock Island line were built, bypassing the city.
Businesses and residents moved, and the post office
closed in 1909. Truck farming and dairying were prev-
alent from 1910 through the 1930s, but there were no
more than eighty residents in Bedford as late as 1940.