Ft Worth, TX
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Parked for a few hours at the Ft. Worth stockyards. An earlier photo and
as it looks today. Much of the area has been built over into a tourist mall.
The stores and cafes are uniquely Texan and Cowboy. Ernest Tubb Record shop here as
CW music you have always wanted and had no idea how to get it. Complete box set for instance of Carl Smith hits. Signed (thats right-autographed) photos of Ranger McCrae. One store sold a deck of Texas holdem cards with bulletholes through the deck. A must see for any western enthusiast. A trip into Billy Bob's saloon - large night club honky tonk complete with rodeo arena. If that arena is too small for you-the Coleseum is next door.
8 comments:
10 days to Iditarod
Mackey still leads the quest
I would have loved to see those stockyards when they were used for that purpose. I wonder howmany cattle they will hold, they go as far as you can see. Can you imagine feeding all those cows each day - no tractors! On a smaller scalle, Land's End in Homer has developed the old cannery at the mouth of the Kenai River into a mall with new inovations coming.
The picture of the stockyards caught my attention and begged for research. Fort Worth was the last major stop between Texas and the railhead in Kansas for those herds from south Texas going to market. Between 1866 and 1890, over 4 million head of cattle went through Fort Worth. In 1876, the railroad cvame to Fort Worth, a businessman from the east invested his money into building the stockyards. Armour and Swift wuld also build a packing plant. The stockyards covered an 80 acre site, containing 2,600 pens with a overhead walkway to view the cattle by prospective buyers. Each of the pens were paved with clay bricks, made in small community a short distance from Fort Worth, there was over 6 million clay bricks used. In 1912, the horse and mule barns were built, these barns would hold 3,000 horses and mules. They would become the largest sale barn for horses and mules, reaching their peak during World War I when they were being purchased for the war effort. The largest demand was for mules and they named it "Mule Alley", the peak sales occurrd in 1917 when a total of 115,000 mules were sold. Now you know just a tiny bit of the rest of the story.
And you can see the red bricks to this day.
Must be visiting the Beehive State.
Mackey lost the race!
Just a note to let you know my oldest son Josh will be marrying the mother of his children on my birthday...that is monday by the way...a very small ceromoney on the Turnagain Arm....Dad will be officiating it....Love you much...Come home this summer??
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