Tyler in the 1940s14 cards: 3 firsts, 2 claimed firsts and 9 beginnings
- The Ella Reid Library, once the Negro Public LibraryChartered and supported by Tyler’s African American community.
- The city’s survey dates Tyler’s first Black officers to the 1940sAssigned to Black neighborhoods; integration followed in the 1960s.
- An Army Signal Corps school trains at Tyler Commercial CollegeIts first class began radio training in April 1942.
- Construction begins on Camp FanninAn infantry-replacement training center, ten miles northeast of Tyler.
- Prisoners of war arrive at Camp FanninMen of the Afrika Korps; the camp held more than 1,000.
- Voters create a separate junior college districtA tax levy and a bond issue for its own campus.
- Delta flies from Tyler againService resumed in 1946 and ran until 1957.
- Texas College houses a campus of Tyler Junior CollegeFrom 1946 to 1966.
- The Tyler Foundation and a rose research foundation startHelp for new businesses, and research for rose growers.
- Camp Fannin becomes a tuberculosis sanatorium122 patients arrived by train from Kerrville.
- The Apache Roses perform for the first timeForty young women, at a TJC football game.
- The first Black attorney to try a case in the county courthouseHe won, in the 7th Judicial District Court.
- Bergfeld Center, called Tyler’s first suburban shopping centerThe city’s National Register documentation calls the late-1940s Bergfeld Square “Tyler’s first suburban shopping center” in one passage, and Bergfeld Center, opened in 1949 on South Broadway, “one of Tyler’s first suburban shopping centers” in another.
- First water fills the original Lake TylerThe original lake is on Prairie Creek.