Dagley Field

The flying students came from a college that had drilled cadets since its first year. Military training at Texas Technological College began in 1925 and formal A&M ROTC in 1936, and by 1939-40 enrollment stood at 4,246. Regular enrollment fell during World War II, but the Handbook of Texas counts 4,747 men trained in the college's detachments for the armed services. Air Force ROTC followed in 1946, and enrollment climbed to 7,992 by 1955 and 19,490 by 1969. A Navy ROTC program began in 1983 and was being phased out from 1991.

What the plaque says

Dagley Field Aircraft vastly changed the face of war and Dagley Field played a part in that transformation. As tensions mounted in the late 1930s, the United States created the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP), administered by the Civil Aeronautics Administration. This program offered college students classroom instruction and flight time. The classes eliminated those who lacked potential and ensured that only qualified candidates trained to be army or navy pilots. Texas Technological College in Lubbock trained about 6,500 CPTP and Pre-Flight students in the 309th College Training Detachment (Aircrew) from September 1939 to June 1944. Half of these students flew at Dagley Field. The airport was located on 34th Street and extended one-half mile west from Quaker Avenue to Utica Avenue and then south to 42nd Street. It consisted of four dirt runways and one 140-foot long hangar, which served as an office, workshop and doping room. Maenard F. "Dag" Dagley moved his flying service onto this quarter-section of land after the U.S. Army Air Forces moved into the Lubbock Municipal Airport in June 1942. In March 1943, Dagley himself was called into wartime service, and Clent Breedlove of Breedlove Aerial Service assumed responsibility for the students. Training ended on June 30, 1944, and the airfield name changed to Lubbock Aero Field, offering private lessons and charter flights. Due to a welding accident, the hangar burned on April 29, 1945. After the war ended and the demand for trained pilots decreased, the field closed. In late 1946, long-time property owner Samuel D. Baggett subdivided the land into commercial and residential lots, naming the new addition College Heights. Later, Stubbs Elementary School opened and served the children of Lubbock until 2001. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Ranching Heritage Center — 2.5 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Buddy Holly Center — 4.1 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 4.3 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• American Windmill Museum — 5.2 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.

More markers nearby

• Coronado High School — 0.2 mi
• Monterey High School — 1.7 mi
• Texas Tech Judging Pavilion — 2.4 mi
• Texas Tech Alumni Association — 2.5 mi