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Grand Prairie Texas Vintage Retro Embroidered Cotton Cap - White Logo
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Start further back than Texas. Horses evolved on this continent and then vanished from it — gone from the Americas some ten thousand years ago, surviving only on the far side of the land bridge their ancestors had crossed. Every wild horse that has run the American plains since is descended from the ones that came back, and the ones that came back came in Spanish ships: Iberian horses with Barb blood in them, the tough, close-coupled stock of southern Spain and North Africa. The first of them on record in Texas arrived in 1542 with the Moscoso expedition — the remnant of De Soto's army, marching through the eastern pines looking for a way home to New Spain. The men eventually left by sea. Not every horse left with them.
Then, in September 1940, ground broke on an aircraft plant beside Hensley Field, part of the industrial mobilization Roosevelt had just named the arsenal of democracy. 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, and at peak the line ran at better than one aircraft an hour. From August 1941 to August 1945 the plant turned out 12,967 Texan trainers, 966 Liberator bombers, and 4,790 Mustangs.
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.
