The town arrived later, and it arrived for the railroad. In 1863 a settler named Alexander McRae Dechman founded the community first known as Dechman. When the Texas and Pacific reached the depot in 1876 the place became a rail town, and in 1877 the name the railroad used — taken from the great grassland the tracks ran across — became official. Grand Prairie incorporated in 1909 as a farming and ranching crossroads and stayed one for thirty years: a name taken from the land, and a founder's name taken off the map.
The field next door has a story of its own. Hensley had been an army airfield since the 1920s, on land the city of Dallas bought and leased to the Army in 1928. In May 1941 the Navy commissioned a reserve aviation base on part of it, and somebody looked at the map, counted the hundreds of miles of dry country between that runway and the nearest ocean, and started calling it the Prairie Navy. The name stuck. What came through it is the strange part: fleet pilots and Marines, Coast Guard, the WAVES — the women who enlisted for emergency service and kept the place running — a contingent of Free French forces a long way from France, and three men who would later leave the atmosphere entirely. By the end of the war the field held 4,104 people.
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.
