They Still Call it Cowtown - History of Fort Worth, Texas

Fort Worth, a city of more than 600,000 on the western end of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, is only 30 miles from Dallas. Culturally, however, Fort Worth is half a continent from Dallas. Fort Worth, as its Chamber of Commerce once proclaimed, is "Where the West Begins." Dallas is more like a prairie-bound New York without an accent.

As its name suggests, Fort Worth began as a military town. Maj. Ripley A. Arnold of the U.S. 2^nd Dragoons established a cavalry post on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River on June 6, 1849. When the Army left on Sept. 17, 1853, a small settlement that had built up in view of the fort's flag remained.

The seat of Tarrant County, organized in 1850, was called Birdville. By 1855, despite the departure of the military two years earlier, the settlement that had grown up adjacent to Fort Worth clamored for status as county seat instead of Birdville. In an election in which the Democratic process was liberally enhanced with free whiskey and voters imported especially for the occasion, Fort Worth won.

But Fort Worth's exposed position on the frontier, which left it vulnerable to Indian raids, as well as the Civil War and Reconstruction, kept the town small. At one point after the Civil War, the population amounted to only 175.

Prosperity finally settled on Fort Worth in the early 1870s along with the dust kicked up by Longhorn cattle being pushed up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Kansas for shipment back East. Fort Worth became and wild and wooly cow town-a place to lay in supplies and enjoy a little recreation before resuming a long, hard trek north.

By 1875, a revived Fort Worth had incorporated as a city. In the summer of 1876, the Texas and Pacific Railroad reached the city, further stimulating its growth as a business and transportation center for northwest Texas. Within a 24-year period, eight additional railroads converged on the city, adding to its growth and importance.

Fort Worth's first cut of prosperity came from cowboys passing through town with their cattle herds. In the early 1900s, cattle stimulated a second boom as Fort Worth grew into a beef-processing center. Sprawling stockyards developed adjacent to the railroad lines and soon served three large packing plants operated by Swift, Armour and McNeill & Libby.

Stimulated by the packing industry, Fort Worth's population boomed. In a decade, the city grew nearly 300 per cent. By 1910, it had a population of 73,312.

Two events coming seven years later brought even more growth to Fort Worth. The first was America's entry into the war in Europe in 1917. The Army built Camp Bowie, a huge infantry training facility, injecting a $1.6 million monthly payroll into the city's economy. Fort Worth teemed with troops, construction workers and business people who came to serve their needs.

The second major development of 1917 was the discovery of oil at Ranger, Texas, a small town only 90 miles from Fort Worth. Other fields soon came in-all within 135 miles of Fort Worth. The city became the "capital" of West Texas.

World War II brought another boom. The Vultee Aircraft Corp. (now General Dynamics) began manufacturing warplanes at a new plant in Fort Worth and the Army located an air field there which became Carswell Air Force Base.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, Fort Worth was no longer dependent on the cattle or oil industries. The city's economy had diversified along with its population, but the impact of the city's cowboy heritage remained. Though the packing plants are long gone (Swift closed the last big meat-packing plant in 1971), and the old stockyard area has been transformed into an entertainment district, the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show-founded in 1896-- remains the largest such event in the nation. Culturally, though it has two of the largest art museums in the Southwest, Fort Worth still is a cow town.