Then, in September 1940, ground broke on an aircraft plant beside Hensley Field. 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. From August 1941 to August 1945 that plant turned out 12,967 Texan trainers, 966 Liberator bombers, and 4,790 Mustangs.
Today Grand Prairie stretches long and narrow across Dallas and Tarrant counties, from Mountain Creek Lake down toward Joe Pool, a Metroplex city that kept its prairie name. The runway is still there, now the Armed Forces Reserve Complex; the racing is still there; the grass is still the thing underneath all of it. Wild horses, fighter planes, and a grandstand — same ground, three centuries. Wear the history, and carry a little of it home.
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.
