Beyond outpost: Fort Worth, 1880-1918

Abstract

Beyond Outpost: Fort Worth, 1880-1918 argues that historians have neglected the importance of the period between 1915 and 1918 for Fort Worth's development into a metropolitan area. The focus is on economics but attention is also given to Hell's Half Acre, Fort Worth's legendary vice district, and the associated municipal infrastructure, particularly the waterworks, which constituted a reoccurring problem. The study concludes that Fort Worth reached an apogee in 1919 when its manufacturing output surpassed all other Texas cities. Fort Worth's history was one of struggle, a struggle that the city came very close to losing. During the Civil War the area suffered a declining population and a stagnate economy before cattle drives in the late 1860s sparked commercial activity. After 1870 the herds declined, sending Fort Worth into another crisis before the arrival of a railroad in 1876 rejuvenated the economy. In the 1880s an impressive railroad expansion fostered the beginnings of a municipal infrastructure with paved streets, streetcars, and the first waterworks. In the second half of the decade many citizens realized that railroads did not provide sufficient commercial stimulation, that great cities needed factories. The Panic of 1893 devastated Fort Worth so thoroughly that less industrial output was recorded in 1900 than in 1890. The arrival of the Swift and Armour packinghouses in 1903 offered yet another rescue from economic insignificance, doing so to the degree that Fort Worth spent years savoring its good fortune. After 1914 Fort Worth began to recover its zeal for industrial expansion. in part, because of a happy confluence of spiraling demands for meat and grains as supplies increased at the same time that oil was discovered at Ranger, Texas and that civic boosterism revived to play an important role in attracting four major World War I military bases. The synergisms of those forces made Fort Worth Texas' largest industrial producer in 1919.