Tyler is the county seat of Smith County, located in east-central Texas, United States. The city of Tyler has long been Smith County’s major economic, educational, financial, medical, and cultural hub. The city is named for John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States.

Tyler had a population of 96,900 in 2010, according to the United States Census Bureau, and Tyler’s 2017 estimated population was 104,991. It is 100 miles (160 km) east-southeast of Dallas. Tyler is the principal city of the Tyler Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had a population of 209,714 in 2010, and is the regional center of the Tyler-Jacksonville combined statistical area, which had a population of 260,559 in 2010.

Tyler is known as the “Rose Capital of America” (also the “Rose City” and the “Rose Capital of the World”), a nickname it earned from a long history of rose production, cultivation, and processing. It is home to the largest rose garden in the United States, a 14-acre public garden complex that boasts over 38,000 rose bushes of at least 500 different varieties. The Tyler Rose Garden is also home to the annual Texas Rose Festival, attracting tourists by the thousands each year in mid-October. Tyler is also home to the Caldwell Zoo and Broadway Square Mall.

In 1985, the international Adopt-a-Highway movement originated in Tyler. After appeals by local Texas Department of Transportation officials, the local Civitan chapter adopted a 2-mi (3-km) stretch of U.S. Highway 69 to maintain. Drivers and other motorists traveling on this segment of US-69 (between Tyler and nearby Lindale) will notice brown road signs that read, “First Adopt-A-Highway in the World.”

Legal recognition of Tyler was initiated by an act of the state legislature on April 11, 1846. Texas created Smith County and authorized a county seat. The first plat designated a 28-block town site centered by a main square, located within a 100-acre tract acquired by Smith County on February 6, 1847. The new town was named for President John Tyler, who advocated for annexation of Texas by the United States. A log building on the north side of the square functioned as courthouse and public meeting hall until it was displaced by a brick courthouse in 1852. On January 29, 1850, Tyler was incorporated. Early religious and social institutions included the First Baptist church and a Methodist church, a Masonic Lodge and an Odd Fellows Lodge, and Tyler’s first newspaper.

Though Tyler’s early economy (1847–1873) was based on agriculture, it was also well-diversified during this period. Logging was a second major industry, while complementary manufacturing included metal working, milling wood, and leather tanning. As the seat of Smith County, the town also benefited from government activity. The local agricultural economy relied on slave labor before the Civil War. By 1860, Tyler held over 1,000 enslaved persons, which represented 35 percent of the town’s population.

So there was strong support for secession and the Confederacy within Tyler, as a high percentage of its residents voted for secession and many of its men joined the Confederate Army. The town was secure enough for the Confederacy to establish the largest ordnance plant in Texas. In 1870, the first bank in Tyler was established by Bonner and Williams. Though both the Texas and Pacific Railroad and the International Railroad (Texas) eschewed routes through Tyler, the town gained an important rail connection when the Houston and Great Northern built a branch line in 1874.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, fruit orchards emerged as an important new business in the regional economy. Eighty percent of the county agricultural revenue derived from cotton as it persisted as the dominant crop in the first decades of the twentieth century. Peaches were the principal fruit crop as the county fruit tree inventory surpassed one million by 1900. Disease struck the peach trees, though, and local farmers moved toward growing roses by the 1920s. Twenty years later, most of the US rose supply originated in the Tyler area.