Pleasant Valley

Pleasant Valley was at the junction of Pleasant Valley Road and the Long Branch of Muddy Creek, five miles northeast of Garland and twenty-two miles northeast of Dallas in northeastern Dallas County. It received a post office in 1876 with T. J. McClain as postmaster. By 1880 the community was a distribution center for the northeastern corner of Dallas County, shipping cotton and grain. The population was 1,000. In 1884 Pleasant Valley had three steam gristmills and cotton gins, a church, a school, a doctor, three general stores, a druggist, and a population of sixty. A 1900 map of Dallas County by Sam Street shows Pleasant Valley as the center of a large population concentration. The decline of Pleasant Valley was heralded by the failure of the railroads to go through the community in the 1880s. The post office was removed in 1905, and the population slowly declined, dropping to twenty-five by 1915 and twenty by the 1940s. The last mention of Pleasant Valley in the Texas Almanac was in 1960, when the population was still twenty. In the 1980s the only remnants of the town were a church, a few other structures, and a cemetery.