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.
The fort came first. On June 6, 1849, a company of U.S. Army dragoons under Major Ripley Arnold raised a camp on a bluff above the Clear Fork of the Trinity, one of a line of frontier posts strung along the edge of settlement. That autumn it was named Fort Worth, for Major General William Jenkins Worth, a hero of the recent war with Mexico who had died earlier that year. The soldiers stayed only a few years — by 1853 the frontier had moved west and the army moved with it — but the civilians who took over the empty buildings stayed, and a town grew up around the old parade ground.
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.
