The Farms Under the Runway

The airfield that became Bergstrom Air Force Base, and later Austin's airport, was built on three thousand acres of the Santiago del Valle grant that the City of Austin bought and leased to the federal government for one dollar a year. Austin voters approved the bond overwhelmingly, and the Chamber of Commerce notified the Army of the result on 15 March 1942. Construction began that May, and the contractor had sixteen hundred civilian workers on the ground within weeks. What they cleared first was a farming community. The Army's own 1944 account of the work is the record of what went. More than thirty single family houses came down, along with tenant dwellings it called innumerable. An African American school and a Mexican school were destroyed. A Baptist church and a Methodist church were consumed. Windmills, cisterns, barns, hundreds of outbuildings and miles of fencing went with them. Other schools, chapels, cotton gins and a private telephone exchange were lifted and moved rather than flattened. Many of the families displaced, the same account records, had lived on that ground for generations. The first aircraft touched down on 24 September 1942, before the field was finished. Five days later fifty transports of the 316th Troop Carrier Group flew in from Georgia and landed at three second intervals, which the base's publicity office called the largest and longest mass flight of transport planes in aviation history to that time. When the base opened to visitors on 10 January 1943, an estimated thirty thousand people walked through it.