Companion to No. 01 · 1013 Poindexter Street

Samuels Avenue, 1886A man from Milwaukee drew this street. Most of it is gone.

In 1886 an artist named H. Wellge drew Fort Worth from the air and sold prints door to door. In one corner of the sheet he put the North End — Samuels Avenue, the cemetery, a harness-racing track and a dance pavilion. I went looking for those buildings. This is what I found, and what I got wrong on the way.

Engraved 1886 bird's-eye vignette titled North End and Driving Park: Samuels Avenue and Evans Street at left, a cemetery, scattered houses, a fenced oval racing track at right and Cold Spring Road. — **“North End and Driving Park.”** Border vignette from *Fort Worth, Tex., “The Queen of the Prairies,” county seat of Tarrant County 1886* — drawn by H. Wellge, lithographed by Beck & Pauli, published by Norris, Wellge & Co., Milwaukee. Library of Congress, G4034.F7A3 1886 .W4. **Public domain.** · See the whole sheet ↗

Aerial photograph of the same ground in 2026: apartment blocks and houses in the foreground, the Trinity River winding across the middle distance, flats and industry running to the horizon under open sky. — **The same ground, 140 years on.** Photographed from a drone on **5 October 2026**, framed the way Wellge framed it — looking away from downtown, horizon a third of the way up, the river crossing the middle distance. This is a match of *composition*, not of surveyed viewpoint; nobody knows exactly where Wellge put his imaginary eye. The river is still there and so is the road. Almost nothing else in the top picture is.

What's Actually In It

Four street names, a track, a pavilion

Four street names are legible and no others: SAMUELS AVE, EVANS ST, WOODS, and COLD SPRING ROAD. Samuels and Cold Spring are the same route, labelled at two points along it.

Left of center is Pioneer's Rest Cemetery, the town's first burying ground, at 620 Samuels. At the far right is the Fort Worth Driving Park — chartered in March 1883, opened that November, a board fence around the whole tract and a grandstand flying a flag. It closed around 1889.

The men who opened the track were not a civic committee. Among the partners was the attorney Robert McCart, who the year after this drawing was published put up bail for Luke Short after Short killed Longhaired Jim Courtright outside the White Elephant Saloon — and Jake Johnson, a gambler who was Short's partner in that saloon. The park ran prizefights and baseball as well as horses, and a gun club shoot with several hundred live birds.

It is easy to make a racetrack sound like a drawing. Here is the Gazette on 25 November 1883, reporting the close of the park's first successful week:

The sun shone brightly through the afternoon, though it rose in the clouds after a slow falling mist. The management's reduction of the price of admission to fifty cents proved a popular step, as the largest crowd of the meeting was in attendance… The interest in all the events was great; notably, the cow pony race and the ride of the equestriennes. The time made in the half-mile dash of cow ponies was good.

Fifty cents at the gate. A half-mile dash for cow ponies, and women riding — three years before Wellge drew the oval you are looking at.

And just west of the track sits a long, low building with two cupolas on the roof. It opened in 1885 as the Rosedale Pavilion, at the north end of the Rosedale streetcar line — sixty feet by a hundred and ten, built to give people a reason to ride to the end of the line. Five hundred came the first night, for a fourteen-piece band, a militia drill and a military ball.

Peter Grunewald took it over about 1892. He closed it in 1905, once the packing plants were running upwind of it, and pulled it down in 1909 — then used the lumber to build himself a house on Samuels Avenue and six rental cottages on Pavillion Street. Five of those six are still standing. The building is gone. The wood is still keeping rain off people.

Detail of the 1886 vignette: a board-fenced oval with a double rail, horses and sulkies, spectators and a long grandstand flying a flag. — **The Driving Park.** Double-railed oval, sulkies on the track, carriages on Cold Spring Road.

Detail of the 1886 vignette showing a long low building west of the racetrack with two cupolas on its roof. — **The pavilion.** Two cupolas, west of the oval — the same roofline that shows up in a later photograph, taken after Peter Grunewald took the place over.

One thing this drawing is not

A survey. Bird's-eye views were sold by subscription, door to door. Prominent buildings got flattered and empty blocks got furnished. It's wonderful for street names and for things drawn large and labelled. It is not reliable for measuring distances or matching individual houses — a lesson I learned the expensive way, below.

Whose Name It Is

Terry · Snow · Samuel

Before it was an address, Samuels Avenue was the road from a plantation into town.

Colonel Nathaniel Terry, a former lieutenant governor of Alabama, farmed the north end of it — corn, wheat and oats. Thirty-six enslaved people worked that ground, and it was enslaved labor that quarried the local limestone and built Terry a Greek revival house near Traders Oak.

During the Civil War Terry decided to sell. A shoemaker named David Snow offered him twenty thousand dollars for the place in gold. Terry turned the gold down and insisted on Confederate money, saying it was the better currency. The South lost, and so did he.

Baldwin Samuel of Kentucky bought the plantation from Snow about 1870. He died in 1879, and the road running from his land down into Fort Worth took his name and kept it.

And the cemetery in the drawing

In the summer of 1850 two of Major Ripley Arnold's children, Sophie and Willis, died at the fort. Arnold's friend Doctor Adolphus Gouhenant set aside three acres of his own ground to bury them in. Three years later Arnold was killed in a duel at Fort Graham with the fort's own surgeon; in 1855 Gouhenant had his body disinterred and brought back to lie beside the children.

In 1871, after a cemetery association was formed, Baldwin Samuels gave three adjoining acres — and that is Pioneer's Rest. He is buried in it. So are General Edward H. Tarrant, who gave the county its name, Captain Ephraim Merrill Daggett, Dr. Carroll M. Peak, and seventy-five Civil War veterans.

And so is M. A. Holloway, 1837–1921 — the woman who signed the 1911 plat that laid out the ground 1013 Poindexter stands on, four blocks north of her grave.

I had three of those details wrong until I went and read the marker. I had the daughter as Sophia, the doctor as Gounah, and no date at all on Samuels's three acres. The marker spells his name with the s, the way the street does.

And if you have ever driven that stretch and wondered why the grade feels engineered — it is. The Gazette, 25 March 1887: “The late work on Samuel's avenue has resulted in putting that much travelled road in first-class order, as it has been widened and the big hill this side of the old cemetery cut down.”

They took a hill out of the street. The paper spelled it Samuel's, with the apostrophe, which tells you how recently it had been one man's name.

Texas Historical Commission marker headed Pioneer's Rest Cemetery, recording that the burial ground was started in the summer of 1850 upon the deaths of Sophie and Willis Arnold. — **The marker, read off the post.** Texas Historical Commission, Pioneer's Rest Cemetery, 620 Samuels Avenue. Photographed 5 October 2026. This is where the three corrections above came from.

One more thing about this street, because the rest of this page is about big houses and it would be dishonest to leave it out. The avenue ran along the bluff and the wealthy took the view. Behind them, down along the railroad tracks, stood the shotgun houses of the men who worked the railroads, the stockyards and the packing plants.

None of those are in the list below. Not one of them survived, and almost nobody wrote them down. That absence is the same argument this page is making, running the other way.

The Oak

1849 · 1954

The oldest thing on Samuels Avenue is not a building. It is a live oak in the 1200 block, and the story attached to it is older than every house on this page by nearly forty years.

Four sources tell that story the same way — the City of Fort Worth, the Texas A&M Forest Service, Mike Nichols in Lost Fort Worth, and a Tarrant County Historical Society marker set in the ground beside the tree. In 1849 the Army would not permit trading within a mile of the fort, so Henry Clay Daggett and Archibald Leonard measured off the mile, stopped at this oak and the spring beside it, and put up a log cabin behind the tree. Tarrant County held its first election there in 1850 and its first district court in November of that year, Judge Oran M. Roberts presiding. None of the four cites a document — so I am telling you whose account it is, rather than handing it to you as fact.

A broad live oak in Traders Oak Park with two green park benches beneath it and a granite marker set flat in the concrete walk between them. — **The tree itself.** Two benches, and the marker set flat in the walk between them. By the four accounts above, Daggett and Leonard’s log cabin stood behind this oak — somewhere in the open ground past the benches. **None of them says where exactly, and none of them will say how old the tree is.** Photographed October 2026.

Thirty seconds, one move. It starts under the oak and keeps climbing until downtown comes up over the roofs. The tree, the street and the city, in the order they arrived. Shot 5 October 2026.

What the Gazette says about it

Nothing, and I looked properly. The Fort Worth Gazette ran from 1882 to 1898 — sixteen years in which men who had been here in 1849 were still alive and still writing in. Daggett and Leonard, in every spelling the two names could be set: zero. Each man alone: zero. “Trading post” returns eighteen articles — Fort Berthold on the Missouri, the Yukon placers, Cape Juby on the Moroccan coast, the founding of San Angelo — and not one of them is about Fort Worth.

The Gazette began thirty-three years after the fact, so this proves nothing. But a city's own paper running sixteen years without once naming the business it supposedly began with is a real silence, and I would rather show it to you than leave it out.

Granite marker set in the ground reading Tarrant County Historical Society, Historic Tree, Traders Oak, with an engraved tree and covered wagon. — **The fourth telling, in granite.** Tarrant County Historical Society marker, Traders Oak Park. Photographed 5 October 2026.

The marker adds one thing none of the others do. It says the first election was held under this tree in 1850 and that Birdville was voted the first county seat.

So the one event everybody agrees happened here is the election Fort Worth lost. The county seat went up the road to Birdville. Fort Worth got it back later, in a second election I have not gone and documented yet, so I will leave that part alone. But the first vote went against this town, under this tree, and that is sitting in the grass where anyone could read it.

There is a second reason the record looks thin, and it is the better one. The name is younger than the tree by a century. The City bought this ground in June 1953; the park board voted to call it Traders Oak Park on 14 December 1954. Before that vote there is no Traders Oak to search for. For a long time I read those empty results as a warning about the story. They were a warning about my search.

I'm not going to tell you how old that tree is. A city parks department, a state forestry service, a published historian and a granite marker have all now had their say about this oak, and not one of them will put a number on it. Nobody has shown me a ring count, a survey or a dated photograph, and a number repeated often enough is still not a measurement. What I can tell you is which parts of this come with paper and which parts come with a plaque.

The Houses

1870s — 1889

Samuels Avenue splits down the middle. The west side is Mulligan Addition — deep lots running six hundred feet back to the West Fork of the Trinity. The east side is Samuels Unrecorded Addition, shallower and tighter. Odd numbers west, even numbers east.

Four nineteenth-century houses on one block are documented, and a fifth stands a little further up. Here is what became of them.

Standing

731 Samuels Avenue

The Bennett-Fenelon House

Built in the 1860s or 70s for David Chapman Bennett, a dry goods merchant who became a vice president of First National Bank. Italianate, with what one account calls “rhythmic corbels supporting the deep roof eaves” and a front porch on four original Tuscan columns. Mike Nichols calls it “perhaps the oldest house in town still in its original location.”

The Fenelon family held it for roughly a hundred years. It sits on about an acre and a half running down to the river. Today it's Saddlerock Wine & Beer Co. — you can go have a glass in it.

Here is how well known it was. A classified advertisement in the Gazette for 25 November 1884 offers rooms to let “on Rosedale car line, Samuels avenue, near the residence of D. C. Bennett” — view them to-day, apply at the office of D. Boaz, corner of Main and Fourth.

You did not need the number. You found the street by looking for this house. It is still the thing you look for, and now you can get a glass of wine in it.

That ad also puts the Rosedale streetcar on Samuels Avenue in 1884 — a year before the pavilion opened at the end of the line. The pavilion was built to give an existing route a reason to ride it.

Demolished 2003

About 750 Samuels Avenue

The Foster-Hodgson-Pool House

Built 1882, next door to the Bennett house. Nichols records that it appears on this very map, between the Garvey and Bennett houses.

It came down in 2003. If my reading of the drawing is right, the engraving below may be one of the better surviving pictures of it.

The 750 block of Samuels Avenue in 2026: a street sign reading Morrison St and Samuels Av 750, a low stone retaining wall and clipped hedge on the left, a driveway running back between an apartment building and an older house. — **The 750 block, 5 October 2026.** This is the stretch of Samuels the Foster-Hodgson-Pool house stood on until 2003 — the street blade in the frame is the 750 marker. **I'm not claiming the exact parcel**; the address on this card has always been *about* 750, and the drawing will not fix it closer. What the picture shows is the block, and no house of 1882 anywhere in it.

Standing

760 Samuels Avenue

The Getzendaner House

Built circa 1885 on the east side — three stories, a wrap-around porch, a steep gable with decorative shingling. The 1885 city directory lists John Getzendaner as a stockman. The owners were given a residential rehabilitation award by Historic Fort Worth in 2013 for bringing it back.

It's offices now.

Standing & landmarked

769 Samuels Avenue

The Garvey-Viehl-Kelley House

The initial structure went up in 1884–85; the Queen Anne showpiece — the bell-domed corner turret, the rounded stair tower with stained glass — came in the 1890s.

Built for Lulu Foster Garvey and William B. Garvey — the 1885 directory lists him as a sand dealer. Mrs. Garvey was a descendant of Baldwin Samuel, the man the street is named for. After both Garveys died in 1915 it passed to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Buckner Orphans Home; the Viehls bought it in 1918 and Mrs. Viehl lived there until 1958; the Kelleys bought it in 1972.

It is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark and a City of Fort Worth Historic and Cultural Landmark, and it now serves as the office and clubhouse for the apartments built around it.

Note the surnames: Lulu Foster Garvey, next door to the Foster-Hodgson-Pool house. Probably family — though I have not traced the line, so that is an inference and not a finding.

Mike Nichols calls it the most photographed house in the neighborhood. I have not found a nineteenth-century picture of any of the others.

Standing

823 Samuels Avenue

The Reilly-Lehane House

Built in 1889 by Jesse J. Nunnally, who would go on to become city auditor. He did not stay in it.

The Reilly and Lehane families called it home for ninety-eight years between them — which is the single most useful fact on this page. A house lived in for a century does not get demolished, because somebody is always in it.

Four blocks north of these houses, on a street that was still called Pearl when it was platted, there is a 1924 bungalow that went through the same test and passed. It was lost in 2008 and brought back in 2021. It is also, right now, for sale — which is why this page exists, and I would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

Read No. 01 — 1013 Poindexter

Reading the Row

A reconstruction, not a certainty

Three houses sit in a row on the west side of the drawing, each on a long lot running back toward the river. Going south to north, they line up with the three west-side addresses — and the reason I believe it isn't that the rooflines match.

Annotated detail of the 1886 vignette marking three houses in a row on the west side of Samuels Avenue, numbered 1, 2 and 3, and a fourth larger house across the road marked A. — Three houses on the deep west-side lots, and one across the road on the east side.

Engraved detail of a two-story house with a long formal walk running from the road to its front porch. — **A long formal walk to the door.** The approach to 731 Samuels is still described that way — a long walkway flanked by urns and shaded by mature oaks.

Engraved detail of a two-story house with a steep front-facing gable and a finial at the peak. — **Steep gable, finial at the peak.** Substantial, and four years old when this was drawn.

Engraved detail of a small modest house on a large lot. — **Small.** Because in 1886 it was one year old, and its turret was still a decade away.

Why I think this holds

The order is published. Mike Nichols wrote that the Foster-Hodgson-Pool House appears on the 1886 map between the Garvey and Bennett houses. That is exactly the sequence in front of me: Bennett, then Foster-Hodgson-Pool, then Garvey, south to north.

The sizes track the dates. House 1 is substantial — it had been standing twenty years. House 2 is substantial and gabled — four years old. House 3 is small.

And house 3 being small is a prediction, not an observation. The Garvey house's turret and stair tower are 1890s work. In 1886 only the modest 1884–85 core existed. A small house is what ought to be in that spot — and a small house is what's there.

Still not proof

Four things agreeing is a good reconstruction. It is not a document. I have not confirmed this with a historian, a Sanborn sheet or a city directory, and until I do, this page says I think and not it is.

If you know this street and I've got it wrong, please tell me. I'd rather be corrected than quoted.

What's Gone

Two buildings, one park

Engraved detail of a large two-story house with a low hipped roof and rows of tall narrow windows, standing in a fenced yard. — East side of Samuels, facing the Cold Springs junction.

The one I couldn't name

This is the largest house in the frame and I spent days on it. I proposed it was a streetcar headquarters, a mule barn, a ward school, and the Bennett house. Every one of those was wrong.

“Building A” is my label, not anyone's name for it. I gave it a letter because I could not give it a name.

Every wrong guess failed the same way, and it took me too long to see why. No standing building could match it, because it isn't standing.

What I know: a large two-story house is drawn on the east side of Samuels Avenue near the Cold Springs junction in 1886. Nothing resembling it stands there now. And in 1914 the city made Arnold Park out of the sites of twelve houses, together with the old county orphans' home beside them on Cold Springs Road.

What I infer: that this is one of the twelve. I can't prove it. Proving it would mean matching a drawn building to a lot, and this drawing will not carry that weight — which is the thing this page keeps saying about itself.

So: a large house, on this street, gone before 1914, and probably under a playground. That is as far as the evidence goes, and I would rather stop there than hand it a name it may never have had.

Detail of a 1911 Sanborn fire insurance map showing a pink masonry building marked D and 2, outlined on all four sides by a yellow dashed band indicating a frame gallery, at 731 Cold Springs Road. — **731 Cold Springs Road, 1911.** Pink is masonry. Yellow dashed, all the way round, is a frame gallery. Every other building for blocks is yellow.

The brothel that became an orphanage

Three blocks from the racetrack, on the same road, Frankie Brown kept a two-story brick house with double galleries running round all four sides. Respectable women were said to look the other way as they passed it.

In 1887 Belle Burchill, twice Fort Worth's postmistress, talked the county into buying the place and turning it into the city's first orphanage — the Fort Worth Benevolent Home for Stray Children.

I went looking for it on paper and found it. The 1911 Sanborn fire insurance sheet for Cold Springs Road draws exactly one masonry building in the whole neighborhood: 731 Cold Springs Road, pink for brick, marked two stories, wrapped on every side by a frame gallery. The road in front of it is lettered not paved.

It was demolished in 1914. That same year the park board voted to buy the old county orphans' home on Cold Springs Road to enlarge Arnold Park — which also sits on the sites of twelve houses.

A photograph survives of it packed with children: thirty along the upper gallery, as many again below, boys lined up at the picket fence, a matron alone at the foot of the steps. It is held by UTA Special Collections under a licence that does not let me reproduce it here, so here it is where it lives.

Newspaper column headed BENEVOLENT HOME, with a sub-head reading What Is Being Done at This Charitable Institution, and an engraving of a winged figure of Charity. — **Fort Worth Daily Gazette, 23 October 1888.** The reporter came in out of the rain.

What the Gazette found inside

The Fort Worth Daily Gazette for 1882 to 1891 is digitized and searchable, and because it is long out of copyright I can quote it instead of describing it. Everything below is the paper's own words.

A reporter walked into the building on 22 October 1888 and wrote it up the next morning under the headline BENEVOLENT HOME, beside an engraving of Charity with her sash. He had stepped in from the rain, and he found everyone busy.

At that moment there were twenty-five children in the house, from infants to thirteen years old, and several adults besides.

The County Commissioners, the paper says, had purchased the building for $6,000, and the court had just appointed three trustees: W. J. Boaz, M. B. Loyd and Jesse Jones — about as much Fort Worth money as could be put in one sentence.

Then one of the women running it told the reporter how fast it had happened:

It is now about a year since we started on Main street with a few waifs, and now we have a well kept home with a building worth $6000. What may we not expect in another year?

A year earlier, in September 1887, Mrs. B. M. Burchill had opened the Fort Worth Benevolent Association in rooms on Main Street — a reading room, a store of food and clothing, and a coffee room meant to earn its own keep. Twelve months later they had the house.

Six days after that story ran, on 29 October 1888, the paper added one more line:

The managers of the Benevolent Home ask that all who have spare bed clothing donate it to the home, as they have more children in the home than can be provided with covering.

On Thanksgiving the children were given twenty-two dollars collected at the union service, and a barrel of apples. The visitors who brought the money were entertained by the children’s exercises and songs, and that evening a few gentlemen came and serenaded the house. And at Christmas 1888 the pupils of the Baptist Sunday school gave up the presents they were owed from their own Christmas tree, and each brought one instead for “the needy who fall to the care of that hospitable institution.”

Twenty-six years later the building came down for a park.

And a thing I'm not claiming

Building A is not this building. The orphanage is wide and horizontal and smothered in two tiers of porch; Building A is tall and narrow with plain walls of windows. Both may well lie inside Arnold Park's three acres, since the park swallowed twelve houses as well. But they are not the same house, and I'm not going to pretend the drawing says otherwise.

Arnold Park in 2026: a City of Fort Worth park sign beneath a wide spreading oak, mown grass running back to a yellow playground, houses beyond. — **Arnold Park, 5 October 2026.** Three acres at the Cold Springs junction. The county orphans' home stood here, and so did twelve houses, and so — I think, and cannot prove — did the building I have spent this page failing to name. **This is what replaced all of it.** Photographed on site.

What Survived, and Why

1886 → today

Building	Built	Today
Bennett-Fenelon House 731 Samuels	1860s–70s	Standing — a wine bar
Foster-Hodgson-Pool House ~750 Samuels	1882	Demolished 2003
Getzendaner House 760 Samuels	c. 1885	Standing — offices
Garvey-Viehl-Kelley House 769 Samuels	1884–85, enlarged 1890s	Standing — landmarked; apartment clubhouse
Reilly-Lehane House 823 Samuels	1889	Standing — one family for 98 years
Rosedale Pavilion by the racetrack	1885	Torn down 1909 — five cottages built from its lumber still stand
Madam Brown's house 731 Cold Springs	by the 1880s	Demolished 1914 — now Arnold Park
“Building A” east side	before 1886	Gone — now Arnold Park
1013 Poindexter Street four blocks north	1924	Standing — brought back in 2021, and the only one here you can walk through

Four of the eight nineteenth-century buildings on this page are still standing. Every one of them survived for the same reason: somebody found it a use. A tasting room. Offices. A clubhouse for the apartments built around it. A house one family stayed in for ninety-eight years.

The four that went, went differently. One was demolished in 2003. Two stood where Arnold Park is now. And one was taken apart carefully enough that five of the cottages built out of its boards are still lived in.

That's the whole argument for old houses, and it isn't sentimental. A building nobody needs comes down. A building somebody needs gets a new roof. And a building nobody needs, taken apart by somebody who does, can still end up keeping the rain off.

Read No. 01 — 1013 Poindexter 817-601-5551

Where This Came From

Sources

The mapLibrary of Congress — Fort Worth, Tex., “The Queen of the Prairies,” 1886, H. Wellge. Public domain, no known restrictions.
The neighborhoodHometown by Handlebar (Mike Nichols) — Samuels Avenue, Parts 1–3, and The Need for Speed.
769 SamuelsArchitecture in Fort Worth — Garvey-Viehl-Kelley House.
731 SamuelsCultureMap Fort Worth · PaperCity · CandysDirt.
StreetcarsFort Worth Magazine — When Streetcars Roamed Fort Worth.
The bookMike Nichols, Lost Fort Worth (The History Press) — the pavilion and its ending, the Driving Park's partners, Pioneer's Rest, Madam Brown, Colonel Terry, and how the street got its name.
The newspaperFort Worth Daily Gazette, 1882–1891, via Chronicling America, Library of Congress — 25 November 1883; 25 November 1884; 25 March 1887; 14, 20 and 21 September 1887; 23 October, 29 October, 1 December and 26 December 1888. Public domain. Quotations transcribed from the page images, not from the machine-read text.
The SanbornSanborn Fire Insurance Map, Fort Worth, Vol. 2, 1911, sheet 121 — Perry-Castañeda Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin; original at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. Public domain. The 1898 edition does not reach Cold Springs Road, so this sheet is the only Sanborn that ever recorded the building.
Arnold ParkCity of Fort Worth — Arnold Park, for the 1914 acquisition of the old county orphans' home.
The oakCity of Fort Worth — Traders Oak Park, for the June 1953 acquisition and the park board's naming vote of 14 December 1954 · Texas A&M Forest Service — Famous Trees of Texas: Traders Oak, for Daggett and Leonard, the one-mile rule, and the first election and first district court. Neither source cites a document for the 1849 account.
The markersTexas Historical Commission, Pioneer's Rest Cemetery, 620 Samuels Avenue · Tarrant County Historical Society, Historic Tree — Traders Oak, Traders Oak Park. Both read off the post and photographed on site, 5 October 2026. The cemetery marker corrected three things I had already published.
The photographsThe marker photographs and the drone clip are the author's own work, shot 5 October 2026. Everything else on this page is credited above.
The search that found nothingChronicling America, full run of the Fort Worth Daily Gazette, Fort Worth Gazette and Fort Worth Weekly Gazette, 1882–1898. Searched: “Daggett and Leonard,” “Daggett & Leonard,” “Leonard and Daggett,” “Henry Clay Daggett,” “Archibald Leonard” — zero results each. “Trading post” — eighteen results, all read, none concerning Fort Worth.
The orphanage photograph“Madame Brown's house of ill repute” — Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, UTA Libraries Special Collections. Linked, not reproduced.
Still chasingThe Texas Historical Commission marker file for 769 Samuels; Fort Worth city directories 1885–1890; the Daily Gazette for June 1885 and November 1883; a photograph of the Foster-Hodgson-Pool house, of which none has yet surfaced. Also a Fort Worth paper printed after December 1954 — the Fort Worth Press is digitised only through 1948, and the Star-Telegram is not digitised at all, so the first appearance of the name Traders Oak in print is still out of reach. And a photograph captioned “Grunewald Pavilion on Samuels Avenue” at the Portal to Texas History, which may or may not be the pavilion on this page under a second name. Linked, not reproduced.