John Valentine Pliska

Pliska, born in Moravia in 1879, had learned the blacksmith trade in his father's shops and attended a balloon and glider school in Bavaria while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1903, riding a train toward Mexico, he stepped off at Midland, helped repair a windmill, and was hired by C. C. Slaughter. A Wright Model B that landed in Midland in 1911 spurred him on. His biplane, built largely from buggy and windmill parts with a 33-foot wingspan, flew over the polo grounds of the Quien Sabe Ranch in 1912 before mesquite trees ended its career.

What the plaque says

John Valentine Pliska Mechanical genius who made and flew first locally-owned aircraft. Born in Austria, Pliska came with parents to Texas, and after 1903 followed blacksmith trade in Midland. He built (1912) and flew at intervals up to 15 minutes an aeroplane of his own invention. (plane now in museum at Midland-Odessa air terminal.) Pliska was a master Smith. Gen. John J. Pershing had U. S. Army horses shod here during border trouble prior to World War I. Branding irons for a large west Texas area were also made here. Pliska married Louis Hundle. They had seven children. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bush Family Home State Historic Site — 1.0 mi
  The small 1939 frame house on West Ohio Avenue where George and Barbara Bush raised their young family in Midland's 1950s oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site.
• Museum of the Southwest — 1.2 mi
  Midland's art and science museum in the 1937 house of oilman Fred Turner and his wife Juliette, with added galleries, a children's museum and a planetarium on the grounds.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 1.9 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 9.2 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.

More markers nearby

• Brown-Dorsey House — steps away
• Former Site of Midland National Bank — steps away
• Site of Midland County's First Bank — steps away
• Staked Plains — steps away