Amon G. Carter

Carter's gift was selling a city. He popularized the line that Fort Worth is where the West begins, and his Shady Oak Farm hosted visiting celebrities and executives. He is credited with persuading Southern Air Transport, a forerunner of American Airlines, to move from Dallas to Fort Worth, and with helping bring Air Force Plant 4 and Bell Aircraft. He was also the first chairman of the board of the Lubbock college that became Texas Tech. The best-known story, probably embroidered, has him carrying a sack lunch to Dallas so he would spend nothing there.

What the plaque says

Amon G. Carter Born in Wise County, Texas, on December 11, 1879, Amon Giles Carter left home at an early age and worked at a variety of odd jobs around the country before his arrival in Fort Worth in 1905. Carter became the advertising manager of the "Fort Worth Star", which published its first issue on February 1, 1906. Thus began a career in journalism that by 1925 had taken him to the position of president and publisher of the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram," the newspaper with the largest circulation in Texas for many years. Carter's involvement in a wide variety of interests left its mark on many Texas institutions. In 1921, he authorized the purchase of equipment that resulted in the establishment of WBAP Radio in Fort Worth. An aviation enthusiast, Carter brought numerous early aviators to Fort Worth to demonstrate their skills and helped attract aviation industry to the area. His promotion of Fort Worth and the entire West Texas region attracted widespread attention. Much of the fortune he earned in oil was spent on philanthropic interests, including establishment of the Amon Carter Museum as a gift to Fort Worth. Amon G. Carter died in Fort Worth on June 23, 1955, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 0.4 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 1.9 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 2.2 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 2.7 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.

More markers nearby

• First Christian Church of Fort Worth — steps away
• Fort Worth Library — steps away
• Freese and Nichols, Inc. — steps away
• Ephraim Merrill Daggett — steps away