The former home of Walker now serves the citizens in various ways, most prominently the Roswell Air Center's service to Dallas and Phoenix. In 1967, Walker Air Force Base was decommissioned and the city had to reinvent itself. The park displays a piece of the Berlin Wall, presented to the city of Roswell by the German Air Force. On November 11, 1996, the park was renamed POW/MIA Park. The small park just south of the cross was then known as Iron Cross Park. In the 1980s, a crew cleaning the river bed cleared off the concrete and revealed the outline once more. Later, the iron cross was covered with a thin layer of concrete. Some POWs used rocks of different sizes to create the outline of an iron cross among the stones covering the north bank. The German prisoners of war were used to do major infrastructure work in Roswell, such as paving the banks of the North Spring River.
The Roswell Rotary Club (which included Goddard was a member) has helped preserve his legacy, making Roswell the "Cradle of Space Exploration." You can enjoy this exhibit year around at the Roswell Museum.ĭuring World War II, a prisoner-of-war camp was located in nearby Orchard Park.
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After Goddard died in 1945, his widow started a series of gifts to the Roswell Museum and Art Center of her husband's rocket technology. Without those experiments, the United States would have later not won their race to the moon and begun the human race's early space exploration. Goddard remained in Roswell for 12 years working on the secret experiment and record-breaking rocket launches. In the 1930s, record-breaking aviator Charles Lindbergh and financier Harry Guggenheim chose Roswell as a location for scientist Dr.