Meacham Field

The airport's name honors a department-store owner who briefly ran the city. Henry Clay Meacham, born in Mississippi in 1869, moved his dry-goods business to Fort Worth in 1905 and later led the citizens' group behind the 1924 council-manager charter. The new council appointed him mayor in 1925. He resigned in April 1927 for poor health, the year the field took his name, and he died in December 1929. In 1929 he also bought radio station KFJZ, seeing that radio could advertise for his store.

What the plaque says

Meacham Field On July 3, 1925, the Fort Worth city council approved a lease on 100 acres of property on Decatur Road for the city's new municipal airport. It was built to replace the city's first municipal airport at Barron Field, a World War I-era flying training field near Everman. After passage of the Air Mail Act (Kelly Act) in 1925, airlines began flying the mail over Contract Air Mail (CAM) routes. As headquarters of the 11th district of the U.S. Post Office Railway Mail Service, Fort Worth offered an ideal location to tie together ground and air distribution. On May 12, 1926, National Air Transport Co. (later United Airlines) flew the field's first air mail flight to Chicago. On July 16, 1927, the airport's name changed to Meacham Field, in honor of former Mayor H. C. Meacham. Soon several airlines began to offer passenger service on the CAM routes. By 1931, the airport had expanded to 280 acres. On April 4, 1937, Meacham Field's new Art Moderne Terminal (the first air-conditioned passenger terminal in the U.S.) and control tower were dedicated. During World War II, in April 1943, American Airlines was awarded a contract to train U. S. Navy pilots at the airport on the Douglas R4D (DC-3) transport. In May 1943, the navy commissioned the airport as a naval auxiliary air facility and established a ferry service unit to coordinate cross-country fighter and torpedo bomber deliveries to the pacific and seaplane ferrying services at nearby Lake Worth. When Fort Worth International Airport opened in April 1953, commercial airline operations moved there. Afterward, Meacham Field Developed into one of the world's leading airports for general and corporate aviation, flight training and aircraft repair. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — 1.2 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 3.6 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 4.0 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 4.3 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Early Site of Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show — 1.0 mi
• Woody-Kutch Livestock Commission Company — 1.2 mi
• Coliseum — 1.2 mi
• Fort Worth Stock Yards Company — 1.2 mi