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Fort Worth’s Huge Deal builds on historic and documented data to unwind a twisted legend . . . and track down events before and after 1889 news about a Denver entrepreneur and “the largest real estate transaction ever recorded in Texas.” More than 4,000 acres of largely barren land evolve into a vital community over the course of a century filled with potholes, side trips, erroneous directional signs and occasional dead ends. Atkinson-Wood’s account of Arlington Heights and Fort Worth’s Westside gives rise to several mysteries and a surprise conclusion.
Arlington Heights, Fort Worth’s never-incorporated western suburb, stands as the story of a real estate deal too big and too ambitious for its era—a deal of a magnitude that remains exceptional to this day. The Deal was Humphrey B. Chamberlin’s acquisition, but it had begun germinating nearly a decade earlier. It emerged directed by men in Fort Worth, Denver and London connected by ever-growing railroad systems, steamships and events of the times. Even more intriguing is the degree to which repetitive economic adversity of international scope hampered its development. Its maturity would require nearly another century filled with three global depressions, three international wars, three isolating floods, suspicious fires and murders, and a plague causing more deaths there in a single year than in all of much larger Fort Worth City. Connections branched in diverse directions, taking the story far beyond the local.
Like any suburb of advanced age, Arlington Heights is filled with history and mystery, but more so because it had the extraordinary distinction of housing an army camp. The legend dwindled soon after its origin, then was resurrected by the U.S. Army’s Camp Bowie of 1917 and appears to have become codified by local publications during Arlington Heights’ fiftieth anniversary in 1940. Legend winds through the tale like a continuous strand of yarn—but the yarn is chewed up, severed and tangled. Time compression substantially scrambled the facts.
In this telling, Atkinson and Wood examine events to straighten out the timeline, replace missing stretches, and recognize the deal-makers, builders, pioneers, soldiers, workers, minorities and others who had been forgotten, slighted or overlooked. The authors arrange those people, their accomplishments or failures, into a line of cause and effect. Read more about the authors.
A few of the topics in Fort Worth’s Huge Deal
- 100th Century Division
- 36th Infantry
- Alamo Heights
- Alfred Crebbin
- Army Camp Bowie
- Canadian Aviators
- Carswell AFB
- Deep-Water Scheme
- English Syndicate
- Floods: 1908, 1922, 1949
- Fort Worth University
- Gulf-to-Rockies Scheme
- Holmes Castle
- Humphrey B. Chamberlin
- J. Stanley Handford
- Ku Klux Klan
- Lake Como Pavilion
- Lake Garda Trolley
- Meadowmere Club
- Myth of 20
- Robert McCart
- Scottish Syndicate
- Spanish-American War
- Stove Foundry
- Vernon & Irene Castle
- Williams Sisters Murders
- Ye Arlington Inn