Keller

Keller is on U.S. Highway 377 fifteen miles north of Fort Worth in northeast Tarrant County. Double Springs, two miles north and east of the present site of the community, was settled in the early 1850s, although pioneers had come to the area sooner. The Lonesome Dove Baptist Church sent some members, among them Daniel Barcroft and Permelia Allen, to establish the Mount Gilead Baptist Church in 1852. In 1879, as rumors spread that the Texas and Pacific Railway would push into the northern district of the county, residents began to move to a site nearer the route. They called their settlement Athol.

In 1848 Samuel Needham transferred to Isaac Roberts 640 acres of land for $200. The land contained both the settlements of Double Springs and the site of future Keller. In 1875 Roberts left some of his land to A. G. Roberts, who sold a right-of-way to the Texas and Pacific in 1882 for twenty-five dollars. In July 1881 H. W. Wood gave forty acres to the public for a townsite to be known as Athol. Hoping to have a station and a permanent stop on the line in Athol, the citizens, at the urging of a Texas Pacific foreman or official named Keller, agreed to name the town after him if the site became a stop on the line. The name Athol was dropped, and by 1882 the site was called Keller in abstracts. Tradition says that the train first came through Keller on May 9, 1881, although that date precedes the 1882 date when Roberts sold the right-of-way to the Texas Pacific. A post office was established as Keller in 1888. Cemetery records of Mount Gilead reveal that many settlers in the area were of Scots-Irish-English descent.