North Richland Hills, TX

North Richland Hills grew from two different local stories. In the south, Clarence Jones began subdividing his 268-acre dairy farm in 1952. When nearby Richland Hills declined annexation, residents formed their own municipality; the Jones farm and its 500 residents incorporated as North Richland Hills in 1953. Farther north, Smithfield was already an established rural community beside the Cotton Belt railroad. The expanding city reached and annexed Smithfield by 1960. Those origins help account for a city with no single inherited downtown. Older Smithfield, postwar subdivisions, highway commercial areas, and newer civic districts each supply a different center of activity across northeast Tarrant County. The Cotton Belt corridor still organizes travel through the city. The railroad arrived in 1887, an event remembered as a turning point for the surrounding settlements.

Today, TEXRail provides daily passenger service from Iron Horse and Smithfield stations to Fort Worth, Grapevine, and DFW Airport. At the airport, riders can connect to DART's Silver Line for destinations on the Dallas side of the region. Beside the tracks, the paved Cotton Belt Trail runs four miles through North Richland Hills and continues east to Grapevine. It also connects locally with the John Barfield, Walker's Creek, and Calloway Branch trails. Rail, bicycle, and pedestrian routes share one long east-west corridor whose history predates the city itself. Workplaces and public offices are distributed just as widely. City Hall opened in 2016 at City Point, the former North Hills Mall site near Loop 820. By November 2025, over 300 homes had sold there, the first commercial phase was nearing completion, and the wider project was forecast to finish by the end of 2027.

The surrounding 52-acre redevelopment plan combines homes with retail, restaurant, hotel, and civic uses. North Richland Hills' largest workplaces span a broad local base. Municipal government, Birdville schools, Medical City North Hills, and Tarrant County College provide public, educational, and medical work. Retail and insurance services appear alongside food production, logistics, and packaging among the largest workplaces. Older manufacturing and freight activity remains visible along industrial corridors, while medical and professional offices cluster in other parts of the city. City Point adds a newer civic and commercial district, and Smithfield retains a distinct historic street pattern around the rail station. The library brings several of these threads together in a town-center setting near residences, schools, recreation facilities, and shops.

Its second-floor Maker Spot is a 4,500-square-foot workspace where resident cardholders can use equipment and attend classes as a library benefit. Most park and recreation capital improvements draw on a voter-approved half-cent sales tax, tying purchases in the city to public facilities. In spring 2026, City Hall Plaza hosted four free Friday-night Sounds of Spring concerts on the lawn. A much stranger piece of local history survives farther north along the John Barfield Trail. Green Valley Raceway operated from 1960 to 1986 and hosted the 1974 motorcycle jump in which Evel Knievel cleared 11 Mack trucks. A historic plaza now marks the old track beside North Tarrant Parkway, placing that motorsports story directly on a present-day trail route.