What’s with the Mustangs of Grand Prairie? Wild Spanish horses ranged this grassland into the 1850s, and ninety years later a plant on the same prairie built 4,790 Mustang fighters. The answer is two answers, and the second one borrowed its name from the first. Wild horses ran the North Texas prairies here into the 1850s, plentiful enough that the settlers who arrived didn’t bother inventing names for the creeks — they called one spring-fed branch Mustang Branch because Spanish horses ranged along it, and there is still a Mustang Creek running northeast into Tarrant County. Ninety years later, on that same grassland, a factory was turning out fighter planes called Mustangs at better than one aircraft an hour. Two kinds of Mustang, one prairie, and a word that crossed an ocean twice to get here.
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.
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.
