Fort Worth, Texas

In Fort Worth, a very laid-back western city that residents proudly call a “cowtown” and in which they continually look for ways to be different from its big-city rival Dallas 30 miles to the east, most folks consider themselves just “Texans.” They do not know of immigration in the past nor the impact that it has made on their community. In its 150-year history, the city has seen three waves of immigration, each in its own successive half century. First came newcomers from the eastern United States shortly after the Lone Star State emerged in 1845. Then the so-called “new immigration” to America from southern and eastern Europe, beginning in the 1890s, dominated the next 50 years. Third, from the 1950s to the present, Hispanic immigration changed the demographics of the original blue-collar stockyards area of the north side of Fort Worth.

Earliest settlers came from east Texas and the southern states to the little frontier fort in north central Texas that U.S. troops established in 1849 on a bluff overlooking two forks of the Trinity River. In that year, the four-year-old state of Texas enjoyed a population boom that moved the 1850 census figures of 212,592 to 604,215 in 1860. However, farm families moved slowly into the new Tarrant County, in which the fort was located at the edge of settlement. The fort city only grew to 20 log cabins and a couple of general stores by the 1870s, but residents aggressively sought railroads and expansion. Cattle drives and agricultural pursuits continued to draw settlers, especially when slaughtering plants began operations north of [Page 238]the bluff. Some of the workers were African Americans, their ancestors having been brought to Texas by slave-holders before the Civil War.

Meat-packing plants attracted millions of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to major livestock markets such as Chicago, Kansas City, St. Paul, St. Louis, Omaha, and Fort Worth. European poverty or oppression, as well as cheaper steamship passenger tickets and those jobs, brought nearly twenty million immigrants to America in the three decades after 1890. This “new immigration” meant that by 1900 Fort Worth swelled to 25,000. When the two largest of the “Big Four” meatpacking giants, Armour and Swift, built large, modern slaughtering plants in 1902, Fort Worth's growth was assured. The city became a railroad hub, as 10 different lines connected there. Because of the growth of its livestock market—with its meatpacking plants and the immigrants having arrived to work in them—Fort Worth's population tripled to 75,000 in 1910.

A new community called North Fort Worth, north of the bluff and its fort, developed between the Trinity River and the stockyards area. The larger city of Fort Worth annexed it in 1909. In 1923, Fort Worth annexed the stockyards area, which had operated for over a decade as Niles City, called the “richest little city in the U.S.” because of the population ratio of its small numbers in the company town in relation to the $30 million property value wealth of the stockyards industrial district.

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