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.

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.

Three of the four Gibson brothers in this group established homesteads about 4 miles (6 km) northwest of present-day Mansfield.

When Ralph Sandiford Man and Julian Feild arrived around 1856 and built a grist mill at the crossroads that was to become the center of Mansfield, the beginnings of the community probably existed in the oak groves bordering Walnut Creek (originally called Cedar Bluff Creek).

Feild opened a general merchandise store at the same time as the mill, located across Broad Street.

During the American Civil War, the Man and Feild Mill supplied meal and flour to the Confederate States Army, hauling it to Shreveport, Louisiana, and Jefferson City, Missouri.

"Feild's Freighters", assembled in ox-drawn wagon trains, went as far as Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where a part of the Indian Wars raged in the southern plains in the late 1860s and 1870s.

Protests by 300 whites in front of Mansfield High School, to prevent three black students from enrolling, touched off one of the longest-running desegregation battles of the Civil Rights Movement.

Even though ownership of the theater has changed hands many times since its inception, the Farr family still resides in Mansfield.

The Mansfield Historical Museum chronicles the city's history from a prairie outpost in the past to a thriving community now.