12 replies to this topic

[Zetna]

Every so often I run through the old photos on "Fort Worth the way we were" site. I found this old photo of the Burkett family home built in 1905 just seven years after the family moved to Fort Worth....I went to the address of 2308 Market St on the Northside and the house is still there, though remuddled over the years.

 

http://www.fortworth...urketthouse.jpg

 

https://maps.google....ved=0CC8Q8gEwAA

[John S.]

This house now has stucco clad on the exterior, right? If it's the one I'm thinking of, the chamfered Queen Anne style bay still has the scroll-sawn Victorian corbels on the corners remaining. I recall seeing it in the 1980's and '90's without the stucco but in a neighborhood that is approaching 100% Hispanic, many of these older houses are being remodeled in a way to reflect cultural changes with stucco, elaborate wrought iron, and fine brickwork. Oddly enough, the origins of these modern changes actually pre-date the early 1900's architectural styles they are replacing-these are Colonial Spanish elements brought over centuries ago from Spain just as the early American homes in New England reflected the old architecture of England. The Victorians revived some of these stylistic details calling them Colonial Revival.

[Zetna]

John, I'm not sure if it has stucco on it now, but the google map photo shows those asbestos? shingles if you zoom into the shadows under the eaves....to tell you the truth if it weren't for the 1st floor bay window I wouldn't have recognized it as they took many of the gables off the roofline.

[John T Roberts]

The walls appear to have asbestos siding on them.  That's only from what I can tell from Google Street View.

[John S.]

In checking, I was mistaken...the house I was referencing was the c. 1903 Moody House at 2401 Clinton. At least superficially,(in the 1988 survey photo)  it shares some exterior similarities to the Burkett House but pre-dates it by a couple of years. I'm glad I have a copy of the old Near Northside (and West Side-Westover Hills) Historic Resources Survey from 1988. Interestingly, I do not find the Burkett House in the old survey; perhaps it already had substitute siding applied to it in the 1980's and thus was considered non-contributing. The example on Clinton Street has been extensively remodeled since the survey period but oddly the scroll sawn corbels in the front bay were kept-the only hint of its late Victorian style origins.

[Zetna]

Wow, I found the Clinton home too.....I wonder what other treasures are buried beneath alterations over there! Was that area a neighborhood back in 1903 or was it just a few homes / farms? I think my neighborhood of Fairmount was just a farm ( the 1900 Benton house still exists) and very few homes back in that era.

[John T Roberts]

The Town of North Fort Worth was laid out in 1888-89 and was planned to support the Stock Yards.  It was a master planned suburb utilizing the hills and the views of the city.  The meatpacking plants came to Niles City in 1902, even though that community was unincorporated.  That's about the time that development really took off in the suburb.  The town of North Fort Worth incorporated in 1902, but was dissolved and annexed into Fort Worth in 1909.  The people at the Stock Yards realized that Fort Worth was soon going to annex that area, and they incorporated in 1911.  Eleven years later, Niles City became a part of Fort Worth, as did the area around Meacham Field.

 

Because of all the remodeling, I don't think I would have recognized the Clinton House as a historic home.  The changes have been rather radical. It seems like the structures in Fairmount have much more of their historic character still intact before they were remodeled or restored. 

[John S.]

Wow, I found the Clinton home too.....I wonder what other treasures are buried beneath alterations over there! Was that area a neighborhood back in 1903 or was it just a few homes / farms? I think my neighborhood of Fairmount was just a farm ( the 1900 Benton house still exists) and very few homes back in that era.

 

As you and John Roberts have mentioned, many of the older homes in what was originally North Fort Worth and Niles City have been insensitively altered in recent decades. I do not know of any efforts to create additional historic districts in the area. Grand Avenue, on the western fringes of the neighborhood, comes closest to defining the original vision developers had for the area as it was being platted in the 1880's. We should remember that those years were boom times and other areas like Arlington Heights/Lake Como, The Padilla Addition (roughly between Hemphill and today's I-35 down to Magnolia were being platted then as well. But the 1890's were disappointing especially after the deep ("Panic") recession of 1893 hit, which, until the Great Depression of 1929, had been the nation's worst economic decline. By the time economic activities resumed to their pre-recession levels in the early 1900's other considerations dictated the path of development. The hastily built smaller homes to house meat packing workers families on the near northside in the early 1900's were far less opulent than what had been envisioned for the area when it was platted almost 15 years earlier. Only Grand Avenue and a few isolated larger homes in the former North Fort Worth/Niles City section came close to the original grand vision.

 

Speaking of the (c. 1898) former Meredith A. Benton House at 1730 Sixth Avenue, I recall back in the 1980's going on one of the first neighborhood home tours in the Fairmount and M.A. Benton's elderly daughter was a docent at the house. She said her Dad had been a traveling salesman for the R.J. Reynold's Tobacco Co. and when he came home from the T & P Depot to their home it sat way out in the country. She said it was so remote in the early days that packs of coyotes could sometimes be heard at night howling around the house. In was not until almost a decade after their Victorian era home was built that the neighborhood now known as the Fairmount-Southside started taking shape around it.  The 1891 Bird's-eye view map of Fort Worth: http://www.birdseyev...Worth&year=1891 (Amon Carter Museum site) shows very sparse development south of Rosedale-it was not until the coming of the meat-packing plants in 1902 that Fort Worth's population exploded and new neighborhoods were being built in almost every direction including southward and northward.

[djold1]

This is a very interesting topic.  Over on my Facebook wall I have loaded a clip from an 1889 Fort Worth Gazette page that shows the original plat of North Fort Worth as John Shiflet mentioned...

 

1889 North Fort Worth Plat

[John T Roberts]

It's amazing how much of it was laid out as it was platted.

[Zetna]

Thanks for all the historic info.! I had heard of Niles City, but not sure of it's location...also, didn't know there was the separate town of North Fort Worth. I have heard (not sure if it's true) that the smell of the meatpacking plants on the north side spurred a lot of development on the south side.

[John T Roberts]

When I was a kid, at the time that both Swift and Armour were operating, in the winter, you could smell the meatpacking plants all over the South Side of Fort Worth.  You could smell them at least as far south as the Baptist Seminary, maybe further.

[John S.]

When I was a kid, at the time that both Swift and Armour were operating, in the winter, you could smell the meatpacking plants all over the South Side of Fort Worth.  You could smell them at least as far south as the Baptist Seminary, maybe further.

I think the opening of the plants in 1902 contributed to the decline of Samuels Avenue (between Downtown and the Stockyards) in the following years. It's popular Pavilion-Beer Garden at the north end of Samuels closed I believe in 1907 and surely the packing plant odors played a role.  I recall reading during some excavation work in the Stockyards a few years ago that a trench uncovered a 75 year old large pit filled with Pig dung which had been covered over. (not sure how the Pig offal/dung determination was made) I've also heard anecdotal accounts that the meat packing plants and Stockyards produced some very potent odors during certain times of the year depending on wind direction and velocity. As noted, the most impressive Northside residential district (Grand Avenue) was also the most distant from the processing plants and Stockyards. Maybe it was not a coincidence either that the old City garbage dump was located off Northside Drive near the current UPS shipping hub. Today's stricter environmental laws would probably make it difficult to have an operation on the scale of the old packing plants in their current urban location.