The Stockyards

The 1876 Boom and the Building of Hell's Half Acre

By Tom Reyes

The Texas & Pacific Railway reached Fort Worth on the nineteenth of July, 1876, and within six months the population of the town tripled. Before the railroad, Fort Worth was a windblown county seat of perhaps eight hundred souls, most of them merchants supplying outfits to the Chisholm Trail drovers who paused here on the long northern push. The arrival of the rails was not just an improvement in transit. It was the beginning of a different city.

The shipping pens went up almost immediately along the north side of the tracks. So did the saloons. The fourteen-block stretch of First, Second, and Third streets between Main and Throckmorton, which had been a half-occupied flatland of mesquite and brush, became, within a year, a continuous frontage of frame buildings hammered together fast and painted later, if at all. The men who arrived to work the railroad and the pens needed somewhere to sleep, somewhere to drink, and somewhere to spend a Friday wage. Hell's Half Acre, as the district came to be called by 1880, supplied all three with a kind of frontier-grade efficiency that the respectable side of town would spend the next forty years pretending not to notice.

The buildings themselves were not built to last. Most were single-wall plank construction, twenty by sixty feet, with the saloon on the ground floor and rooms above for whatever business the upstairs occupant was conducting. A fire in 1889 took out an entire block of them; the block was rebuilt within two months in brick, which is why the surviving frontages along West Second Street today look slightly more substantial than the original Hell's Half Acre actually was. The brick was a concession to insurance, not to permanence.

By the mid-1880s the district was hosting figures whose names would later be mythologized out of all proportion: Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Etta Place, the Wild Bunch's famous five-man portrait taken in 1900 at John Swartz's photograph studio on Main Street. Bat Masterson came through. Luke Short shot Jim Courtright in front of the White Elephant Saloon in 1887, an event the city has been telling slightly different versions of ever since. Most of what gets told about Hell's Half Acre at tourist remove is true in outline. What gets lost is the daily texture: the laundresses who worked the alleys, the Black porters who staffed the better hotels and were not allowed to drink in them, the Mexican cooks in the kitchens, the children who grew up in rooms above the saloons and went on to ordinary Fort Worth lives that left almost no documentary trace.

The campaign to close the Acre began in 1889 and took until 1917 to finish. It was driven by a coalition that does not survive in any single name — Baptist preachers, suffragists, the Fort Worth Record's editorial page, the railroad companies who wanted the land for terminal expansion, and a steadily growing middle class who had moved into the new streetcar suburbs and did not want their husbands wandering home from First Street at three in the morning. The Acre did not so much close as it was, building by building, condemned, bought out, burned in suspicious fires, and finally paved over. The convention center now sits on top of much of it. Walk the surface parking lots on a summer evening and the ghost of the district is still there in the grid of the streets, which run a few degrees off from the rest of downtown because they were originally laid out to follow the rail right-of-way.

What the Acre left Fort Worth, beyond a great deal of legend, was a habit of mind. The city has always had a tolerance for the slightly disreputable that distinguishes it from Dallas, thirty miles east, which has spent its entire civic history trying to look respectable to the rest of the country. Fort Worth never bothered. The result is a downtown where, even now, the bond traders and the cattle agents drink in the same bars, and the bars themselves still have something of the rougher original about them. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, most of what makes Fort Worth Fort Worth.