The modern city is largely the work of one long-serving mayor, Tom Vandergriff, who set out at mid-century to turn a town of a few thousand into something far bigger. The pivotal stroke came in 1961, when the first of the regional theme parks in the United States opened in Arlington — the idea, as the story goes, of dropping a roller coaster in a cotton field and calling it the future. It worked. Major-league baseball followed, then professional football, and the stretch of ground between the old farm town and the highway became a national entertainment district. Arlington had reinvented itself as a place people drove to for a big weekend.
The blackland prairie here was Caddo country long before the town. In 1841, in the Republic of Texas years, frontiersmen built Bird's Fort near present-day Arlington, and the Bird's Fort Treaty was signed in the area in 1843 — a frontier accord between the young republic and Native nations on land that had been inhabited for centuries. Settlement followed slowly, with scattered farms and the small community of Johnson Station out on the Cross Timbers.
Why People Visit Arlington
Arlington rewards travelers who want big-event energy with Texas convenience — the stadiums and theme parks of the Entertainment District, set between Dallas and Fort Worth and easy to reach from either. People come for the games, the coasters, and the concerts, and stay for the river-and-lake parks and the offbeat heritage of a prairie town that talked itself into becoming the American Dream City.
