Irving itself is younger than the herd it honors. In 1903 two promoters, Otis Brown and J.O. Schulze, platted a townsite on the prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth, along the rail line that ran between them, and named it for the author Washington Irving — the New Yorker who gave the world Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. The young town farmed corn, wheat, and cotton and shipped its harvest down the rails to the two cities on either side; it incorporated in 1914. The literary name was a flourish for a dusty prairie townsite, but it stuck, and Irving has carried an author's name ever since. From the start, Irving's whole position was its in-between place: close to everything, beholden to neither neighbor.
What Las Colinas chose to put at its center says everything about how Texas sees itself. Not a founder, not a logo — a herd of wild horses. The mustangs commemorate the free-running herds that roamed the Texas range before the ranches and the rails, the animals that carried the state's idea of freedom and grit. Today they are the city's signature, watched over by a small museum in the tower beside the plaza, and the reason a planned business district carries a wild heart. The sculpture took its maker eight years to model and cast, and the plaza around it earned a national landscape-architecture honor award soon after it opened.
Why People Visit Irving
Irving offers art, water, and wild bronze horses in the middle of the Metroplex. Visitors come for the Mustangs, the canals, and the music, and stay for a central, easygoing base beside DFW with museums, sculpture plazas, and trails close at hand. It is both a cultural stop and a convenient home base, with year-round appeal in its parks, paths, and public spaces.
