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Grand Prairie Texas Vintage Retro Vinyl Sticker - Black Logo
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The field next door has a story of its own. Hensley had been an army airfield since the 1920s, on land the city of Dallas bought and leased to the Army in 1928. In May 1941 the Navy commissioned a reserve aviation base on part of it, and somebody looked at the map, counted the hundreds of miles of dry country between that runway and the nearest ocean, and started calling it the Prairie Navy. The name stuck. What came through it is the strange part: fleet pilots and Marines, Coast Guard, the WAVES — the women who enlisted for emergency service and kept the place running — a contingent of Free French forces a long way from France, and three men who would later leave the atmosphere entirely. By the end of the war the field held 4,104 people.
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.
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.
