Aransas County Airport

The field the county built for the Navy met its hardest night in August 2017, when Hurricane Harvey struck Rockport as a Category 4. Seven structures here were destroyed, among them a cinder-block hangar from 1943 that fell at 9 p.m., before the storm officially arrived, and one plane turned up against a game fence. Almost half the T-hangar tenants lost a usable hangar or aircraft. Afterward the airport became a base camp: TxDOT crews cleared debris, one runway served emergency vehicles, another reopened to planes, and more than 1,200 responders and utility workers lived on the grounds.

What the plaque says

Aransas County Airport This aviation facility developed out of a need during World War II for additional air training sites for U.S. Navy pilots. In 1942 the Aransas County Commissioners Court offered the Civil Aeronautics Administration the use of land in the county for an auxiliary military landing field. Voters approved a bond issue and accompanying tax to build the airport, and the county subsequently purchased 700 acres of land for that purpose. For the duration of the war, the site was leased to the Navy, which practiced landing operations out of its regional air stations at Beeville, Kingsville and Corpus Christi. The airport since that time has served both military and public purposes. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fulton Mansion State Historic Site — 2.4 mi
  A French Second Empire house of 1874-77 on Aransas Bay, paid for with hides and tallow, with gas lights, central heat and hot running water no other house nearby had.
• Goose Island State Park — 4.8 mi
  A bayside park between St. Charles and Aransas bays, home of the Big Tree, the state champion coastal live oak, thought to be more than a thousand years old.
• Port Aransas — 17 mi
  The fishing town at the north end of Mustang Island, reached by a free state ferry that crosses the ship channel day and night, with a university marine lab begun in a one-room shack.
• Aransas National Wildlife Refuge — 21 mi
  Blackjack Peninsula's refuge on San Antonio Bay, winter home of the only wild migrating flock of whooping cranes, which fell to about fifty birds and now numbers over five hundred.

More markers nearby

• Rockport Air Force Station — 0.2 mi
• Site of One of the Homes of James Power — 1.6 mi
• Fulton Volunteer Fire Department — 1.7 mi
• Fulton Community Church — 1.9 mi