Fort Worth
House Stories
Every old house in this town has a paper trail — deeds, plats, assessors' cards, permits. Most of it sits in a county office and nobody reads it. I read it, and then I write down what it says.
No. 01 · For sale
A house on the street that used to be Pearl
About seventy-five feet behind this house stands the live oak Tarrant County held its first election under, in 1850. The house came later — 1924, on a lot a widow had platted in 1911 — and in 1958 twenty-five feet of its back yard was signed over to the City for three hundred dollars, which is why the fence sits where it does today.
Told from the county's own paper — a 1911 plat with a spring drawn on it, an assessor's card typed in 1938, and the deeds in between.
Companion piece
A man from Milwaukee drew this street. Most of it is gone.
Eight nineteenth-century buildings read off a bird's-eye view an artist sold door to door. Four are still standing. One is a playground. One was a brothel, then an orphanage, then nothing. And one was pulled down so carefully that its lumber became houses people still live in.
Also a record of the four times I identified a building wrong, and how I found out.
Who’s writing this
My name is Brian St.Clair. I sell houses in Fort Worth. Before that, and still, I’m the person who drives visiting family and friends around this city telling them things that they didn’t know to ask about.
The Stockyards. The Water Gardens. The corner where the Texas Spring Palace burned in 1890, and the monument at Lancaster and Main to Al Hayne — the civil engineer who got the women and children out of it, and was the only person who never came out himself. Hell’s Half Acre, which took up the south end of downtown for decades and left almost nothing you can point at. The upstairs room on Main Street where five men sat for a portrait in 1900 in their good suits and derby hats — the Fort Worth Five, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid among them — and handed the Pinkertons the only photograph they needed. The hotel where John F. Kennedy spent his last night. The old firehouse near Sundance Square. The sleeping panther, and why a town called Cowtown is also Panther City.
Fort Worth has an unreasonable number of good stories and a cast of characters who built the place mostly on nerve.
Being a Realtor gives me another way into them. It’s the job that puts the deed books, the plats and the old assessors’ cards within reach — and every so often what’s in the file turns out to be about something a good deal larger than the house.
That’s what this is. One of those files, written down, each time I get a new one.
Brian St.Clair · Broker, 6th Ave Homes · Fort Worth, Texas
Why bother
Because a house nobody knows anything about is just square footage, and square footage is the least interesting thing about a place to live.
And because the record keeps surprising me. A spring drawn by hand on a 1911 plat. Twenty-eight typed words that explain why a lot platted at a hundred and twenty-five feet deep measures a hundred today. A house that sold for less in 1964 than it cost in 1927.
None of that is in the tax roll. All of it is in the file.
If you own an old Fort Worth house and want to know what's in its file — call. I'll go look.
This is unfinished
Historical research is rarely finished. New records turn up, old assumptions get challenged, and every so often I discover I’ve had something wrong.
When that happens I fix it on the page and leave the correction where you can see it, because a page that quietly edits its mistakes is a page you can’t trust. The Samuels Avenue piece carries a section on four buildings I identified incorrectly, and how I found out.
The rule is simple. Every claim says where it came from, and where the record is silent I say so. Nobody will tell you how old Traders Oak is — not the city, not the state forestry service, not the published historian, not the granite marker in the grass beside it. So I don’t either.
There are two stories here today and more being worked on. They go up when the research is done, not before.
If you know something I don’t — about a house, a street, or a name in one of these files — I want to hear it.
Where this comes from
Most of what’s here comes from public records, county archives, old maps, newspapers and published histories. Much of it is free to anyone willing to do a little digging. If you want to look up your own house, this is where I go.
- Tarrant County deed records
- Every conveyance of a property, what was paid for it, and the volume and page where it is recorded. Online, and the fastest way to walk a house backwards through its owners.
- Tarrant County Archives
- 200 Taylor Street, fifth floor. Open to the public Tuesday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Mondays by appointment. Plat records, named collections and a pre-1900 newspaper database. Call before you go.
- The 1886 bird’s-eye view of Fort Worth
- Drawn by Henry Wellge, held by the Library of Congress, in the public domain, and downloadable at full resolution by anybody. The best picture of this city before the twentieth century.
- Chronicling America
- Library of Congress. The Fort Worth Daily Gazette, 1882 to 1891, searchable word by word.
- The Portal to Texas History
- University of North Texas. The Fort Worth Press, the Record and the Register, and city directories going back decades.
- The 1950 Census
- National Archives. Free, name-searchable, and it will put a family in your house — their ages, their birthplaces and what they did for a living.
- Tarrant Appraisal District
- Year built, square footage of record, bed and bath count. Start here, but treat it as a hypothesis rather than an answer. On a house this old the public record and the house itself often disagree, and the house is the one standing in front of you.
- Mike Nichols
- Lost Fort Worth, and the Hometown by Handlebar blog — the most useful single source on this part of town. He died in 2023. The blog is still up and still worth hours of anybody’s time.
- And go read the markers
- Three details on the Samuels Avenue page were wrong until somebody stood in front of the Pioneer’s Rest marker and read it word for word. A marker is somebody’s account, usually written long after the events on it, so check it against the record like anything else. But they are free, they are sitting right there, and that one corrected me three times.