The Old Air Base Still Shapes Big Spring's College Map

The airfield west of town did more than train pilots and then disappear. Webb Air Force Base grew from the former Big Spring Army Air Field, a World War II bombardier training school. After wartime use ended, the field returned to city control, reopened for military training in 1951, and was formally deactivated in 1977. By the end of 1968, almost 9,000 pilots had trained there.

Howard College carries a quieter part of that story. Its opening classes met in September 1946 in temporary quarters in the hospital area of the former bombardier school, with 148 students enrolled. The college later moved to a 100-acre site in southeast Big Spring, but the old base map still came back into local education.

In 1979, Howard College trustees approved the Southwest Collegiate Institute for the Deaf. That program began instruction in 1980 on a 57-acre Big Spring campus at the former Webb Air Force Base site. The same land that once meant flight training now helps explain Big Spring as a college town, an industrial site, and a military-history place all at once.