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 town itself began with the railroad. In 1876 a market stop was laid out along the new Texas & Pacific Railway and named Arlington, after the Arlington estate in Virginia; it incorporated in 1884. For its first half-century it was a quiet North Texas farm town — cotton, corn, and cattle hauled to the rail line — the kind of place that measured itself by gins and grain, not grandstands. Nothing about it yet suggested the spectacle to come.
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.
