For half a century Irving stayed a quiet farm town of churches and cotton fields. Then the postwar boom found it. Through the 1950s and 1960s the prairie filled with subdivisions, schools, and highways as families poured into affordable new homes within reach of both downtowns. The decisive stroke came on the town's western edge, where the giant new Dallas/Fort Worth airport opened in 1974 — suddenly Irving sat beside one of the busiest gateways in the country, and the farm town's in-between location turned into a business address.
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.
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.
