Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion

The music that made this hall famous was Milton Brown's. After leaving the Light Crust Doughboys in the fall of 1932, Brown formed the Musical Brownies with his brother Derwood, fiddler Jesse Ashlock and a banjo, bass and piano. Bob Dunn later joined on electrically amplified steel guitar, and the band recorded for Bluebird and Decca, about 100 sides in all. Brown died on April 18, 1936, after a crash on the Jacksboro Highway, and Derwood kept the group going for two more years.

What the plaque says

Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion Samuel "Papa Sam" Cunningham was excavating for gravel at this site in 1918 when he discovered an underground spring. Cunningham built a swimming pool and a covered shelter and opened for business in 1925 as Crystal Springs Dancing and Swimming. The popularity of the dance hall was driven by the house band, The Light Crust Doughboys. Sponsored by the Light Crust Flour Company and performing a regular radio show on KFJZ, the Doughboys featured Bob Wills on fiddle and Milton Brown on vocals. Over the course of their 1930-32 shows at Crystal Springs, Wills and Brown pioneered a fusion of Honky-tonk and jazz that would later become known as Western Swing. They consistently packed the 900-person dance floor for late night romps, and Crystal Springs was so popular that Cunningham's son, Henry, ran a bus to transport crowds from downtown Fort Worth. Some sources even hold that famous gangsters such as Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly and Pretty Boy Floyd visited Crystal Springs. In 1932, Brown and Wills both left the band to start their own separate projects. Wills formed the Texas Playboys and left for Oklahoma, while Brown stayed in Fort Worth. In 1933, Fort Worth radio news called Brown "the King of Hillbilly Bands." Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies continued to play at Crystal Springs until his tragic death in a 1936 car accident. After this loss, Crystal Springs entered a slow decline; in 1966, the old dance hall was destroyed by a fire. In 2011, the Texas legislature named Western Swing the "official state music of Texas," commemorating the unique genre that Wills and Brown created at Crystal Springs. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 2.3 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.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 3.8 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.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 4.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Fort Worth Army Air Field — 1.1 mi
• Horace Seaver Carswell, Jr. — 1.1 mi
• Castleberry School District — 1.2 mi
• Camp Bowie in World War I — 1.7 mi