48 Fun Facts About Fort Worth

Fort Worth is the county seat of which Texas county?

Tarrant County first put its seat at Birdville; Fort Worth narrowly won a disputed 1856 election for the title, then a second, decisive vote in 1860.

Fort Worth's original 1849 outpost sat on a bluff overlooking which river?

Trinity River bottomland was the first site, but within months the soldiers relocated to the bluff above the Clear Fork, the spot downtown Fort Worth later grew around.

Which cattle breed's trade historically centered on Fort Worth?

Texas Longhorn steers worth about $4 or $5 at home could fetch $40 up north in the late 1860s, so drovers walked huge herds through Fort Worth toward the Kansas railheads.

Fort Worth's namesake, William Jenkins Worth, held which job?

Army general William Jenkins Worth never saw the place: he died of cholera in San Antonio in May 1849, weeks before the army named its new north Texas post for him.

When the garrison abandoned Fort Worth in 1853, what became of its empty buildings?

Settlers moved into them, turning the vacant post into the start of a town; the military had never owned the land, so it had nothing to sell.

Fort Worth's long-standing slogan says it is where what begins?

The West, as in 'Where the West Begins': the city's daily newspaper ran the phrase on its front page from the 1920s, and Fort Worth took it up as its own motto.

Cattle drives through Fort Worth followed which famous route north to Kansas?

The Chisholm Trail's main trunk ran past Fort Worth, and from 1867 herds bound for Kansas railheads such as Abilene came through, a passing trade that earned the town the nickname Cowtown.

What nearly killed off young Fort Worth?

The Civil War and its aftermath drained Fort Worth of money, food and people; by one count only 175 people remained before the cattle drives revived it.

An 1875 Dallas newspaper jab at sleepy Fort Worth gave the city which animal as a lasting nickname?

A panther could roam a town that dead, the Dallas paper joked; Fort Worth embraced the insult, calling itself Panther City and putting the cat atop its police badges.

Which railway's 1876 arrival triggered Fort Worth's boom?

The Texas and Pacific Railway's first locomotive steamed in on 19 July 1876, and the stalled town boomed: its population passed 6,600 by 1880 as cattle shipping took off.

Which two meatpacking giants opened plants beside the Fort Worth Stockyards in the early 1900s?

Armour and Swift struck a deal with the Stockyards' owners in 1902 and opened side-by-side plants the next year; Fort Worth's population roughly tripled within a decade.

What was Fort Worth's notorious cowboy-era vice district called?

Hell's Half-Acre sprang up to entertain trail-weary cowboys, and officials long looked the other way because its saloons pumped money into the town.

What did Fort Worth's Leonard's department store open in 1963 to carry shoppers in from its parking lots?

A subway: the free M&O line ran from lots beside the river to a station under the store, and it outlived Leonard's itself, carrying riders beneath downtown until 2002.

Fort Worth marshal 'Longhair Jim' Courtright packed the jail on Saturday nights but left whom alone?

The gamblers brought money into town, so Courtright jailed rowdies by the dozen yet let the card rooms run; merchants had warned that a crackdown would hurt trade.

Fort Worth ex-marshal Jim Courtright was shot dead after pressing saloon man Luke Short to buy what?

Protection from his detective agency was the offer, by most accounts; Short refused, the two drew at close range, and Short's first shot took off Courtright's thumb.

Which outlaw gang posed for a famous group portrait in Fort Worth in 1900?

Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch met up in town with detectives on their heels and sat for the camera dressed like the businessmen they robbed; the picture is known as the Fort Worth Five.

Fort Worth preacher J. Frank Norris was tried, and acquitted, for allegedly burning what in 1912?

His own church: First Baptist burned during Norris's crusade against the city's vice district, and prosecutors charged the pastor himself with arson before a jury cleared him.

Which WWI army training installation's arrival helped shut down the Acre in 1917?

Camp Bowie, the 36th Division's training camp built on the city's west side in 1917, brought army pressure and martial law that finally closed the Acre's saloons and brothels.

President Kennedy spent the last night of his life at which Fort Worth hotel?

Hotel Texas put the Kennedys in Room 850; next morning he spoke to a rain-soaked crowd outside, then to a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, his last speeches before the flight to Dallas.

Natural gas beneath Fort Worth is tapped from which geological formation?

The Barnett Shale lies directly under the city, and it was here that Mitchell Energy worked out how to free gas from shale by fracking, a method the whole industry then copied.

What wrecked a downtown Fort Worth bank tower in 2000?

A tornado rated F3 blew out most of the Bank One Tower's windows; the boarded-up skyscraper sat awaiting demolition by implosion before it was rebuilt as the city's tallest residential tower.

Which downtown district, home to Bass Performance Hall, is known for nightlife?

Sundance Square began in the early 1980s as the Bass family's bid to revive a fading downtown, restoring its turn-of-the-century brick buildings rather than clearing them.

Billy Bob's Texas bills itself as the world's largest what?

Honky tonk: Billy Bob's Texas, opened in the Stockyards in 1981 in a former cattle barn, claims the title with room for thousands of patrons and an indoor bull-riding arena.

A vintage train links the Stockyards to which nearby city?

Grapevine took the excursion train over from a freight railroad and now runs it itself, carrying tourists in 1920s-era coaches along the old Cotton Belt Route.

Who designed the Kimbell Art Museum's original 1972 building?

Louis Kahn cut a narrow slot along the top of each curved vault so that daylight spills in and washes softly over the art below; Renzo Piano designed the second building, opened in 2013.

Which Japanese architect designed the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth?

Tadao Ando never trained as an architect: after a brief stint as a boxer he taught himself, and he had won the 1995 Pritzker Prize by the time his Modern opened beside a reflecting pond in 2002.

The Sid Richardson Museum emphasises which two Western artists?

Frederic Remington and Charles Russell were oilman Sid Richardson's passion: from 1942 he bought most of his paintings through a New York gallery, and his foundation opened the museum in 1982.

Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum owns the only painting in the Americas attributed to which Renaissance master?

Michelangelo is believed to have painted The Torment of Saint Anthony at just 12 or 13, copying a German engraving of demons mobbing the saint; the Kimbell bought it in 2009.

Which architect, known for his own Glass House in Connecticut, co-designed the Fort Worth Water Gardens?

Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee finished the downtown park in 1974; at its Active Pool, visitors walk down stepped terraces while water rushes past them on every side.

Which 1970s sci-fi film shot scenes in the Fort Worth Water Gardens' Active Pool?

Logan's Run sent its heroes through the Active Pool, where water rushes down stepped terraces, and other Dallas-Fort Worth buildings stood in for the film's domed city of the future.

Fort Worth hosts which international piano competition?

Van Cliburn, a young Texan, won Moscow's first Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 at the height of the Cold War and came home to a ticker-tape parade; Fort Worth launched the contest in his name in 1962.

Which style, the official state music of Texas, did Fort Worth's Light Crust Doughboys help pioneer in the 1930s?

Western swing took shape when Bob Wills and Milton Brown's Light Crust Doughboys, a radio band formed in 1931 to sell flour, mixed fiddle tunes with jazz, which is why some call Fort Worth its birthplace.

What is the nickname of Texas Christian University's sports teams?

Horned Frogs are not frogs at all: the name is a nickname for the Texas horned lizard, a spiky reptile that can squirt blood from its eyes to scare off predators.

A 1910 fire drove TCU to Fort Worth from which Texas city?

Waco lost TCU after a March 1910 fire destroyed the main building: before it could rebuild, Fort Worth lured the homeless school with a fifty-acre campus and $200,000.

TCU joined which athletic conference in 2012?

The Big 12 took TCU in on 1 July 2012 after the school paid its way out of a pledged move to the Big East without ever playing a game there, rejoining old Southwest Conference rivals.

Which golf legend from Fort Worth made Colonial Country Club his home course?

Ben Hogan won the Colonial National Invitation five times, so often that the course is nicknamed 'Hogan's Alley'; a statue of him stands beside the clubhouse.

Which series ran Texas Motor Speedway's first race, in April 1997?

NASCAR opened the track to chaos: rain flooded the parking lots, Texas closed a stretch of Highway 170 so fans could park on it, and race-day traffic stood still 16 miles from the speedway.

Which annual event, first held in 1896, takes over Will Rogers Memorial Center each winter?

The Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo began in 1896 as a cattle show beside the Stockyards and moved to Will Rogers Memorial Center in 1944; it runs for about three weeks each winter.

Who became Fort Worth's mayor in 2021?

Mattie Parker, a 37-year-old former chief of staff to Betsy Price, won the June 2021 runoff to succeed Price, who had been mayor since 2011.

Paper money printed in Fort Worth carries which small mark in one corner?

FW marks every note from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's Fort Worth plant; a bill without the letters came from Washington, D.C., the bureau's only other printing plant.

Until 2021, FMC Carswell, inside Fort Worth's naval air station, housed what for female inmates?

Death row for federal women was a secure unit at FMC Carswell; it emptied in January 2021, when Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on it, was taken to Indiana and executed.

Fort Worth's main newspaper is the Star-what?

Telegram was the rival evening paper that the two-year-old Fort Worth Star, losing money and close to failing, bought out in 1908; the merged Star-Telegram first appeared in 1909.

Which major airline has its headquarters in Fort Worth, on a campus beside DFW Airport?

American Airlines quit its Manhattan offices for the Dallas-Fort Worth area as the 1970s ended, then settled in Fort Worth beside the airport it turned into its biggest hub.

Which commuter rail line opened in 2019 linking downtown Fort Worth to DFW Airport?

TEXRail's debut was called off hours before its first scheduled run on 5 January 2019, when a signal fault held up federal clearance; the 27-mile line to the airport's Terminal B opened five days later.

The airport Fort Worth opened in 1953, later replaced by DFW, carried which local booster's name?

Amon Carter, the publisher who so disliked Dallas that he reputedly packed a sack lunch for trips there, got his name on the field in 1950; it lost out to Love Field and closed when DFW opened in 1974.

DFW Airport is the second-largest US airport by land area after which one?

Denver's airport sprawls over roughly twice the land; DFW, at nearly 27 square miles, is still bigger than the island of Manhattan and runs like a city, with its own ZIP code, police and fire service.

Lucky Lady II, a bomber from Fort Worth's Carswell Air Force Base, made which aviation first in 1949?

Nonstop flight around the world took Lucky Lady II 94 hours and one minute: the B-50 never touched down between leaving Carswell and returning, because tanker planes refuelled it in mid-air.

Which fighter jet does Lockheed Martin assemble at its Fort Worth plant?

F-35 Lightning II jets roll out of Fort Worth's old 'Bomber Plant', a factory built in 1942 that turned out more than 3,000 wartime B-24 Liberators.