Drive Highway 289 through Gunter this week and count the new signs. A barbershop. A bagel shop. A fruit market. A gym. A plant store. Most of them went up in the last four months, and almost none of them are downtown.
That's the part worth sitting with. Gunter has an actual downtown revitalization plan on the books, one that city council has been discussing publicly for well over a year. But when you look at where the paperwork for new businesses is actually being filed this year, the growth isn't happening where the plan says it will. It's happening a few blocks over, on the highway strip nobody was planning around.
What's opened since spring
Public business listings and state filings tracked by the city show a real cluster of new activity in Gunter since May. Among the names that have shown up:
- Legacy Bagels, now listed at 515 Preston Rd
- Dulce Vida Fruteria, open at 110 TX-289 Ste 1
- Andrea's, also at 110 TX-289
- Gunter Barbershop, at 110 S TX-289 Ste 2
- Marilina's Kitchen, operating out of 520 N 8th St
- Ship It & More, at 605 Preston Rd Suite 200
- Back 40 Blooms, at 500 W Main St
- Hometown Mercantile, Sprinkle Donut, and GROW Indoor Plant Shop, all recent additions to the local business directory
- Aura Lagree and Sunlit Sensations, both at 402 W Walnut St
- Core Fit Gym, which recorded a new state sales tax permit on July 13, 2026
- Walker Support Resources, permitted July 1, 2026
- One Preston Events, permitted May 22, 2026
- A Sonic Drive-In now operating at 925 N 8th St
That's roughly a dozen new businesses in a town most people still think of as one stoplight and a hardware store. It's a real shift, and it's happening fast enough that a resident who took a few months off from driving through the middle of town would notice.
The pattern in the addresses
Look at where those addresses actually sit and a pattern shows up. Most of the new activity is strung along TX-289, the highway also known as Preston Road that runs through the middle of Gunter, plus the side streets that feed into it.
| Corridor | What's landed there |
|---|---|
| TX-289 / Preston Road | Dulce Vida Fruteria, Andrea's, Gunter Barbershop, Legacy Bagels, Ship It & More |
| N 8th Street | Marilina's Kitchen, Sonic Drive-In |
| W Walnut Street | Aura Lagree, Sunlit Sensations |
| W Main Street | Back 40 Blooms |
Only one of the recent openings, Back 40 Blooms, sits on Main Street itself. The rest are a few blocks off it, clustered on the highway that carries traffic in and out of town rather than the historic grid the city has spent years planning to restore.
That distinction matters because Gunter's actual downtown plan is aimed somewhere else entirely.
The plan that's still on paper
Back in early 2025, Gunter city council members were already talking publicly about what a revived downtown could look like. Speaking to a local news crew, one council member described the goal plainly: to give this Grayson County town of about 2,600 residents a place where people can "walk, talk, eat, shop, and have some fun, all in one place."
The plan calls for a new district connecting North 5th Street to Little Elm Creek Road, with room for three restaurants, a performance area, and roughly a hundred parking spots on an adjacent lot the city was working to acquire. It's an ambitious vision for a stretch of town that, as the same council member put it, has gone without investment for years.
That plan has real backing behind it. The city adopted a formal Downtown Master Plan years ago, one that frames downtown as a future walkable destination and flags a natural drainage area running east to west through the district as a potential trail corridor. The intent has been on paper for a while.
What hasn't happened yet, at least based on the business filings so far this year, is the storefronts moving in. The North 5th Street corridor the plan is built around doesn't show up in a single one of the addresses tied to Gunter's 2026 openings. The businesses filing permits right now are choosing the highway, not the historic grid.
What that means if you already live here
If you've been waiting for the "Main Street is coming back" moment, that moment hasn't started yet, at least not in the addresses. What's actually available to you right now is spread along Preston Road and the streets that cross it. That's where the new bagel shop is, where the barbershop is, where the fruit market and the Lagree studio are. If you want to see what's changed in town, that's the drive to take.
Preston Trail Farms, the hardware store, cafe, and pumpkin patch that's been a fixture on TX-289 for years, adds another data point to the same corridor. The business, which relocated to Gunter after starting as the Big Orange Pumpkin Patch in Celina, picked up a new state alcohol license on June 17, 2026. Whatever that means for its cafe or its seasonal events, it's one more sign that the activity in Gunter right now is concentrated on the highway rather than downtown proper.
None of this means the downtown plan is dead. It means the timeline residents should expect is longer than the highway strip's, and that the two stories, downtown's future and Preston Road's present, are running on different clocks. If you're trying to read Gunter's growth by driving through the middle of town, you'll miss most of it. The highway is where it's actually showing up.
A smaller, more local marker of the season: Gunter ISD welcomes students back on August 10, and the district has already published its 2026 football spirit day schedule, with the season opener set for August 28. Between the new storefronts on 289 and Friday nights returning to Gunter High School, the town's rhythm for late summer is filling back in from a few directions at once.
Some of that growth reflects a town that's still figuring out where its center of gravity sits. The Bridges Golf Club, on the other side of town, hosted the Northern Texas Girls Junior PGA Championship this June, a reminder that Gunter's identity isn't limited to one strip or one plan. It's a town assembling itself in pieces, and the pieces aren't all landing in the place the official plan expected.
If you're curious about what any of this means for property values or timing a move in or around Gunter, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks these corridors closely. Nancy Floyd has spent nearly two decades working North Texas suburbs like this one and can walk you through what a shifting commercial corridor tends to mean for the neighborhoods around it. Schedule a meeting when you're ready to talk specifics.
