The History of Terrell, Texas

Terrell was founded in the 1870s as a depot on the Texas & Pacific Railway and named for early settler Robert A. Terrell. Like its neighbors on the Blackland Prairie, it grew up on cotton — the crop that filled the warehouses, paid the merchants on the square, and defined the rhythm of the year. It was a solid, unremarkable county town, the kind of place whose history would be a footnote if not for the world war that came 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 six civilian-run schools in the United States dedicated to teaching British RAF pilots to fly. Over the war years, more than 2,200 RAF cadets and U.S. Army Air Corps airmen earned their wings on the flat land outside Terrell. It's a genuinely unusual chapter — young Englishmen learning to dogfight 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.