City of Harlingen

Harlingen's growth owes as much to the Army Air Forces as to Lon Hill's railroad town. The first personnel arrived in December 1941, and a gunnery school opened here on August 3, 1942, under Col. John R. Morgan, teaching high and low aerial gunnery and B-24 transition. Its nickname was Paradise of the Eastern Flying Training Command. The field closed in 1946, reopened in April 1952 for the Korean War as a navigator school, and closed again in 1962. The city's population rose from about 23,000 in 1950 to 41,000 by 1960, and the field became the civilian airport.

What the plaque says

City of Harlingen Platted 1904; incorporated 1910. Named for town in Holland, by founder Lon C. Hill, Sr. (1862-1935), promoter of railroad and early business enterprises. Here were organized the first irrigation district and first navigation district in Rio Grande Valley. Center for finance, wholesale business, commerce and medical services. Site of Harlingen State Tuberculosis Hospital, Rio Grande State Center for Mental Health and Mental Retardation, Valley Baptist Hospital. Home of Marine Military Academy, "Confederate Air Force" Museum and the Lower Valley Historical Museum. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park — 18 mi
  A flat coastal prairie north of Brownsville where Taylor's army and Arista's Army of the North fought the first major battle of the Mexican War on May 8, 1846, now interpreted from both sides.
• Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge — 22 mi
  A coastal refuge set up in 1946 for wintering redhead ducks, with 417 bird species recorded and, by the Fish and Wildlife Service's account, the largest ocelot population in the United States.
• Stillman House Museum — 23 mi
  The 1850 Greek Revival house of Charles Stillman, who laid out Brownsville in 1848 beside the army's Fort Brown, and for a century the home of the Treviño family.
• Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge — 28 mi
  About 2,000 acres of river forest on the Rio Grande's north bank, the surviving part of Benigno Leal's 1834 land grant, kept as a refuge since 1943 where two bird migration routes meet.

More markers nearby

• Bobby Joe Morrow — 4.4 mi
• James Henry Dishman — 4.9 mi
• Joe Callandret School — 4.9 mi
• Baldemar "Freddy Fender" Garza Huerta — 5.2 mi