Hicks

Hicks is just off State Highway loop 496 eight miles northwest of Fort Worth in northwestern Tarrant County. The Fort Worth and Denver City Railway passed through the area around 1900. The railroad built a switch at the site, which around 1917 became the location of one of three flying fields created under a joint agreement between the Canadian Royal Flying Corps and the United States Signal Corps, Aviation Section. The site, originally called Taliaferro Field by the Canadians, was renamed Hicks Field when the United States entered World War I. Gradually a small business community developed just southeast of the 680-acre airfield. The army closed the field in 1921 but reopened it from 1940 to 1944 to train flyers for World War II. Briefly in the 1960s the Peterbilt Corporation used the abandoned field as a manufacturing and storage facility. The Hicks community population never exceeded fifty, and since the 1960s there have been no population nor business statistics from the community.