In 1910, local businessman J. Fred Smith, influenced by the City Beautiful movement, devised a plan for a downtown shopping area in Celina, acquired land, laid off the square, and built brick buildings around it in eight months. Under his supervision, Celina soon gained macadamized streets, concrete sidewalks, an electric plant, water and sewage systems, a city park, a city lake, and the county's first good road, the Celina Pike, with brick streets added in 1925. Beyond creating a viable shopping center for a small country town, he created a place that greatly improved quality of life for area inhabitants. Over the succeeding hundred-plus years, the square and its surroundings hosted an opera house, a band shell, movie theaters, Saturday drawings, a World War Two scrap iron collection point, parades, pep rallies, festivals, street dances, outdoor movie nights, a veterans memorial, and Cinco de Mayo events. A November 1911 article in The Texas Magazine said that the upbuilding of Celina in the previous eight months probably had no parallel in the United States, and on October 15, 2011, the community celebrated the square's centennial.