Then, in September 1940, ground broke on an aircraft plant beside Hensley Field, part of the industrial mobilization Roosevelt had just named the arsenal of democracy. Grand Prairie was a town of 1,595 people. What went up next to it was concrete and steel with no windows at all — the first fully air-conditioned, artificially lit aircraft factory in the country, a sealed box set down on a prairie where you can watch weather coming from miles off. The federal government built three hundred homes at Avion Village simply to house the people arriving to work in it, and at peak the line ran at better than one aircraft an hour. From August 1941 to August 1945 the plant turned out 12,967 Texan trainers, 966 Liberator bombers, and 4,790 Mustangs.
Over the next two centuries, animals escaped, were traded, or were simply turned loose, and the ones that survived went wild on the grass. They spread north across the plains and became something the Spanish already had a word for — mesteño, roughly a horse belonging to the stockmen, a horse with no owner but the range. English wore the word down to mustang. By the 1800s they were the great curiosity of the Texas prairies: smaller and tougher than anything the settlers brought from the east, able to work all day on thin grass and bad water, which is exactly why every cattle range in Texas ended up running them.
Why People Visit Grand Prairie, Texas
People come for the central Metroplex location and the mix of prairie, lakes, and live racing — and stay curious about an aviation heritage most visitors never expect from a city between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is flat, friendly, and in the middle of everything, with a long horizon and a longer memory than its suburbs suggest.
