The History of Terrell, Texas

When the Texas & Pacific Railway crossed North Texas in 1873, two Kaufman County men, C. C. Nash and John G. Moore, bought 320 acres and laid out a town, named for pioneer settler Robert A. Terrell, whose farm lay on its western edge. It grew fast — incorporated in 1875 and home to about 3,000 people by the mid-1880s, with banks, flour mills, cotton gins and three weekly newspapers. The North Texas Insane Asylum (today's Terrell State Hospital) opened here in 1885, and in 1892 E. H. R. Green made Terrell the headquarters of the Texas Midland Railroad. Like its neighbors on the Blackland Prairie, it shipped cotton, cattle and timber — a busy railroad town whose most unusual chapter came with a world war that went looking for wide-open Texas sky.

In 1941, with Britain fighting for its life and its own skies too dangerous for training, Terrell became home to the No. 1 British Flying Training School — the first of seven civilian-run schools in the United States dedicated to teaching British RAF pilots to fly. RAF cadets — joined from late 1942 to mid-1944 by small numbers of American Army Air Forces cadets — trained on the flat land outside Terrell until RAF training there ended in September 1945. It's a genuinely unusual chapter — young British cadets learning to fly over a Texas cotton town — and the No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum keeps the story alive.

Terrell's most famous son grew up here as Eric Bishop before the world knew him as Jamie Foxx — the Academy Award–winning actor and musician who was raised in Terrell and got his start in the area. He's not the only name: Robert Dennard, the engineer who invented DRAM computer memory, came from Terrell, as did Paralympic champion Randy Snow. Today Terrell is growing as the metro reaches east along I-20, drawing outlet-mall shoppers and commuters, but it still holds onto the flying school and the hometown pride in the kid who made it big.