Harlingen, TX news and local guide

In 1904 Lon C. Hill, a man of Choctaw ancestry who envisioned the Rio Grande as a commercial waterway, founded a town on its north bank and named it for the Frisian city of Harlingen in the Netherlands. The post office opened that year, and in 1905 the first school opened with 15 pupils near the Hill home, the first house in Harlingen. The town was incorporated on April 15, 1910, with 1,126 people, and had 1,748 in 1920. Its economy was at first almost entirely agricultural, chiefly vegetables and cotton, and its location at the junction of U.S. 77 and U.S. 83 made it a distribution, shipping and industrial center.

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Military installations drove growth, and the population rose from 23,000 in 1950 to 41,000 by 1960. Harlingen Army Air Field was followed by Harlingen Air Force Base, which closed in 1962, and the population fell to 33,603 by 1972. Local efforts to buy and reuse the abandoned base and its housing laid the groundwork for a more diverse economy, and the city grew again to an estimated 49,000 by 1985, about 80 percent Hispanic. In the late 1980s tourism ranked second only to citrus in local income, followed by grain and cotton. Sources Wikipedia: Harlingen, Texas