They arrived before dawn the first day, some four hours early.

Dozens of retail-happy residents wiped sweat from their brows, fortified themselves with snacks and got giddy peering through the Mall at Wellington Green’s windows on Oct. 5, 2001, as they waited for the county’s first central-western area mall to open. By 9 p.m. that day, 92,000 people had passed through the doors.

Susan Bursey and her 9-year-old daughter Kara were among them. “We wanted to be part of history,” said Bursey of Lake Worth. “I remember the days when there was nothing out there.”

The 1.3 million-square-foot monolith at the corner of State Road 7 and Forest Hill Boulevard, which turned 10 last week, spurred commercial development in Wellington and the northern State Road 7 corridor.

It also cut down 30- to 45-minute drives many of the 100,000 residents in Royal Palm Beach, Loxahatchee and Wellington endured to get to malls in Palm Beach Gardens, West Palm Beach and Boynton Beach.

“It changed the way of life out here,” said Wellington Mayor Darell Bowen, who moved to the village in 1984.

The standing joke if you wanted to dine out locally – though it was reality – was “do you want to go to Cobblestones or do you want to go out to Cobblestones,” a hamburger joint on Forest Hill, Bowen said. “If you wanted to stay in Wellington, that was your choice.”

During his time as a real-estate agent, before the mall opened, Bowen helped doctors find homes. He couldn’t close deals in Wellington because there wasn’t enough shopping and because the village was too far from the mall in Palm Beach Gardens, he said.

“There was no place to buy furniture, no place to buy electronics, until the mall,” Bowen said.

Wellington also didn’t have much of a town center, so the mall became the community’s meeting place, said Jack Van Dell of Van Dell Jewelers, which has been in Wellington for 30 years.

Taubman Centers of Michigan, the mall’s owner, worked toward the Wellington mall for a dozen years, said William Taubman, its chief operating officer. It was an excellent location because the central-western county’s population was on the rise, and the county already had two strong shopping centers to the north and south: The Gardens mall in Palm Beach Gardens and Town Center at Boca Raton, he said.

“We clearly saw that this was going to be a nexus of growth in the future,” Taubman said. “We planted our flag.”

Woods lined State Road 7 and Forest Hill Boulevard in the 1990s, said Kathy Foster, Wellington‘s first mayor. When approvals came for the mall, which the state had to sign off on, landowners jostled for development rights along State Road 7, also known as U.S. 441, Foster said.

“Everything along 441 just mushroomed,” she said.

Big-box retailers and suburban staples moved in: Lowe’s, Regal Cinemas, BJ’s Wholesale Club.

The Walmart Supercenter at Belvedere Road and State Road 7 opened in 2002, the county’s second. Another Goliath market came in 2004: SuperTarget at Okeechobee Boulevard and State Road 7 in Royal Palm Beach, the chain’s first combination grocery and general merchandise store in Palm Beach County.

State Road 7 was just a two-lane road before the mall was built. By 2005 it was eight lanes.

“It all kind of happened rather quickly,” said David Swift, a Royal Palm councilman for nearly two decades who moved to the village in 1977.

The mall and the growth it spawned translated into jobs, too. Until then, Wellington was a bedroom community, Foster said.

The mall brought 2,500 jobs and about $563,418 in taxes to Wellington the first year it opened. Today the village estimates that along with development on outlying parcels of its 466-acre site, it employs about 12,000 people and pumps $43.2 million back into the local economy. In 2011, the mall site generated $1.69 million in taxes.

Taubman Centers won’t divulge the occupancy rate for the Mall at Wellington Green. But the plaza is doing about as well as 26 others the company runs nationwide including International Plaza in Tampa, Taubman said. The occupancy rate for all the centers is about 88 percent for tenants with at least one-year leases.

By comparison The Gardens mall traditionally has close to a 100 percent occupancy rate, said Al Ferris, leasing director for Forbes Co., which owns the mall. The Gardens, in fact, has a waiting list for tenants, he said.

The two malls, about 21 miles apart, don’t really compete for the same customers, Ferris said.

Wellington is more family-oriented, a neighborhood mall. The Gardens draws regional customers because of its location on Interstate 95 and its high-end stores such as Chanel, he said.

To that end, Wellington‘s opening “put the icing on the cake, in terms of eliminating the Palm Beach Mall,” which closed in January 2010. It also probably put pressure on the flagging Boynton Beach Mall, Ferris said.

Kara Bursey lives closer to the Boynton mall, yet often finds her way to Wellington.

“It is my mall of choice when it comes to quality and the amount of stores,” said Bursey, 19.

In advance of its 10-year anniversary the mall redid its children’s play area, changing to a park theme.

“We felt it was time just to give our customers something new and improved,” said Rachelle Crain, the mall’s marketing director.