Local History
Fort Worth Historical Markers: Cowtown's Story From Army Post to Metroplex
Cowtown started as a four-year army post and became the livestock center of the Southwest. Eight real Fort Worth historical markers tell that story, with addresses you can drive to today.
Photo: Ryan Grewell / Unsplash. Longhorn cattle drive, Texas.
You can drive from downtown Fort Worth to the Stockyards in about ten minutes. That short trip crosses roughly seventy years of Texas history, and most of it sits on roadside plaques you've passed a hundred times without stopping. Texas has more than 16,000 official historical markers, and RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform built to put them back in front of you. This guide walks Cowtown's story through eight real markers you can visit. It starts with an army camp on a bluff. It ends on a boulevard named for a World War I training ground.
The Army Post That Became a City
Fort Worth started as a military installation that lasted four years.
The Fort Worth 1849-1853 marker tells the founding story plainly. On June 6, 1849, Major Ripley Arnold and Company F of the Second Dragoons established a post on this site. Arnold named it for Major General William Jenkins Worth, commander of the Department of Texas. Worth died of cholera before he ever learned about the honor.
The post was the northernmost in a line of central Texas forts. Soldiers built log buildings with earthen floors around a parade ground: stables, housing, a hospital, a commissary, kitchens, laundries, and a sutler's store. In September 1853 the Army closed the fort and moved the troops elsewhere. Settlers moved into the abandoned buildings or tore them down for materials. Those buildings and those settlers became the city.
101 West Belknap Street, Fort Worth, TX
One block away, the Fort Worth "Where the West Begins" marker picks up the thread. A town grew alongside the fort as a supply and stagecoach center. Fort Worth became the Tarrant County seat in 1856. In four years of operation, the post had only one serious encounter with Native people. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
200 W. Belknap, Fort Worth, TX
Cattle on Commerce Street
The nickname came from the herds, and the herds came right through downtown.
The Eastern Cattle Trail marker in Heritage Park is a native stone dug from the Trinity River Valley. It marks the route where drovers pushed cattle north on Rusk Street, now Commerce Street. The herds went straight through town to the bluff, then across the Trinity to the valley below. The herds rested there before the long push north.
From the end of the Civil War to the railroad's arrival in 1876, great herds passed this way to Abilene, Kansas. The Eastern Trail, also called the McCoy Trail, became the Chisholm Trail once it hit the Red River. Fort Worth was the last place to buy provisions before Indian Country. The marker says it directly: the city got its name, "Cow Town," and its first major industry from this period. Historians estimate drovers moved more than four million head through Fort Worth between 1866 and 1890.
Heritage Park, 100 N. Commerce, Fort Worth, TX
Cowboys with trail pay needed somewhere to spend it. The Hell's Half Acre marker on Houston Street explains where. The Texas and Pacific Railway arrived in 1876. Saloons, dance halls, gambling houses, and bordellos then filled the blocks between the courthouse square and the railroad depot. City officials tolerated it because the money mattered.
Luke Short, Bat Masterson, and Wyatt Earp all spent time here. So did Sam Bass, Eugene Bunch, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid. A 1906 newspaper headline called the district Fort Worth's den of sin and refuge of criminals. Cleanup campaigns failed for decades. The district finally closed during World War I, and it took Army officers from Camp Bowie to make it happen. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
1440 Houston St., Fort Worth, TX
Where the Money Was Actually Made
Exchange Avenue is now a tourist street. It used to be the floor of one of the largest cattle markets on earth.
The Fort Worth Livestock Exchange marker stands at the 1902-03 building that housed the Stockyards Company, the livestock commission firms, and the buyers' offices. The market for West Texas organized in the 1870s. T. B. Saunders, Sr. was the first trader, and others followed fast. Small packing houses gave way to multimillion-dollar plants in the early 1900s. Trading nearly doubled by 1910. The building was surrounded by lawns then, which are parking lots now. United Stockyards Corporation bought it in 1944.
201 E. Exchange St., Fort Worth, TX
Walk east and you reach the Swift & Company marker. Swift was a leading national meatpacking firm by the 1880s, and it made a habit of opening branch plants closer to the supply. Texas herds pulled the company here, with the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company doing the recruiting. The plant opened in 1903 and reshaped the city's economy almost immediately. It spawned support businesses including a railway company and a publishing firm. Swift ran the plant until 1971.
Armour opened its own plant just north of the same site in 1902 after local businessmen G. W. Simpson and L. V. Niles negotiated the deal. That plant ran for more than fifty years and closed in 1962. Together the two firms turned a trail stop into the livestock center of the Southwest.
500 block of E. Exchange St., Fort Worth, TX
The War Camp That Built a Boulevard
Cowtown's modern shape came from the Army coming back.
The Camp Bowie in World War I marker sits on the boulevard that carries the camp's name. This was headquarters of the 36th Division from 1917 to 1919. The Army built it to train the Texas and Oklahoma National Guards after the country entered the war in April 1917. The camp was named for James Bowie, who died at the Alamo.
The first troops arrived in July 1917 and slept in deep Johnson grass covering what was then an undeveloped suburb. By November the division had 25,000 men on site. They shipped for France on July 8, 1918. The 36th took a segment of the front on the night of October 6, captured St. Etienne-A-Arnes on October 8, and fought through the Meuse-Argonne operation from October 10 to 28. Every man was back on American soil by June 11, 1919.
4100 block Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX
The road itself has a marker too. Camp Bowie Boulevard was the main artery through the camp in 1917 and 1918, when it was still called Arlington Heights Boulevard. Narrow strips of asphalt ran on either side of streetcar tracks. Business and residential development followed the soldiers out, the street was renamed in 1919, and it got paved with Thurber bricks in 1927-28. You can still drive on them. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
4100 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Tarrant County holds more than 200 official markers, and Fort Worth alone accounts for most of them. You'll never spot them all from the driver's seat. Discovery Mode solves that. It notifies you as you drive past a marker. The Eastern Cattle Trail stone in Heritage Park announces itself instead of blending into the park furniture.
The AI Tour Guide answers the questions a plaque can't hold. Ask what happened to the Swift plant buildings after 1971, or who Ripley Arnold was before 1849, and you get an answer at the curb. Offline mode keeps all of it working past cell coverage, which matters the moment you leave the Metroplex for the ranch roads west of it.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
Keep exploring
