The horses came first, and they came from Spain. Animals brought over by the earliest expeditions escaped, were traded, or were simply turned loose, and the ones that survived went wild on the grass. Over two centuries they spread north across the plains and became something the Spanish already had a word for — mesteno, roughly a horse belonging to the stockmen, a horse with no owner but the range. English wore it down to mustang. By the 1800s they were the great curiosity of the Texas prairies, smaller and tougher than the horses 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.
The town arrived later, and it arrived for the railroad. This ground was Peters Colony prairie in the 1840s, open grass crossed by trading paths between the forks of the Trinity long before anyone platted a street. In 1863 a Nova Scotia-born 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 line renamed it for the grassland it stood on. 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.
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.
