Today Fort Worth wears two hats at once. North of downtown, the Stockyards keep the cowboy past alive in brick and neon; west of it, the Cultural District holds some of the finest museums in America — Louis Kahn's Kimbell, Tadao Ando's Modern, and the Amon Carter — within walking distance of one another. Between them sit Sundance Square, the Fort Worth Water Gardens, and the Botanic Garden, the oldest in Texas. A fast-growing city of skyscrapers and aerospace plants, Fort Worth has held onto the thing that made it: the sense that you are standing exactly where the West begins.
What made the town was cattle. From 1867, drovers pushed longhorns north out of South Texas toward the railheads of Kansas along the Chisholm Trail, and Fort Worth was the last real stop before the long dry run to the Red River. Cowboys laid in supplies, watered their herds, and blew off steam in the saloons and dance halls of a rowdy district that earned the name Hell's Half Acre. Over some seventeen years more than five million cattle walked through town. Fort Worth fed them, outfitted their drovers, and took a nickname it has never shed: Cowtown.
Why People Visit Fort Worth
Visitors come to Fort Worth for the rare combination it offers: a real working cowboy past in the Stockyards, where the longhorns still walk, and a world-class art scene minutes away in the Cultural District. Add Sundance Square, the Water Gardens, the Botanic Garden, and the winter rodeo, and a single day can hold cattle pens and fine paintings. Proud, friendly, and unmistakably Texan, Fort Worth rewards anyone who wants the West and the wider world in the same town.
