Exchange Avenue in the Fort Worth Stockyards seen from above, under the Stockyards Station arch, with brick paving, an old wooden water tower and visitors walking.
Carol M. Highsmith / public domain via the Library of Congress
Texas · Region

Fort Worth & the Cross Timbers

Fort Worth Stockyards, the Kimbell and Cowgirl museums, Dinosaur Valley, Granbury's square, Acton, Chandor Gardens, Cleburne State Park and Dublin's soda plant.

12 places to explore

People probably ancestral to the Tonkawa lived along the Paluxy River for about 6,000 years, and Wichita groups and a Comanche band that wintered under the limestone bluffs came later. The Handbook of Texas puts Caddo, Cherokee and Tonkawa villages on Village Creek until General Edward Tarrant's 1841 attack; a treaty in 1843 moved them to the upper Brazos. Dinosaur Valley State Park keeps tracks made 113 million years ago.

Fort Worth began as an Army post of 1849 on the bluff where the Tarrant County Courthouse of 1895 stands; voters ousted the commissioners who built it, over the cost. Cattle drives and the railroad made it Cowtown, and the Stockyards keep the brick streets, the Exchange Building and a daily longhorn drive. In the Cultural District, the Kimbell Art Museum is Louis Kahn's building of 1972, and the National Cowgirl Museum honors women of the West.

Granbury's limestone square, Decatur's granite courthouse and Acton's grave of Elizabeth Crockett lie to the southwest and north. Weatherford has Chandor Gardens, Cleburne a CCC park, and Mineral Wells a lake built in 1922 for a spa town's water, now a park with a 20-mile trailway. In Dublin, a bottling plant lost its Dr Pepper license in a 2012 settlement but still sweetens its sodas with cane sugar.

What to See in Fort Worth & the Cross Timbers

12 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

A shallow pool in the Paluxy River at the main track site of Dinosaur Valley State Park, with dinosaur footprints visible in the limestone bed beneath the clear water and a Tracks sign standing in the pool.

Dinosaur Valley State Park

Glen Rose

Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.

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Hikes & Trails

Dry limestone creek bed below the spillway at Cleburne State Park, seen from the bluff through cedar trees

Cleburne State Park

Cleburne

A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.

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Lake Mineral Wells seen from an overlook above oak woods, the lake narrowing between wooded hills under a clear blue sky.

Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway

Mineral Wells

A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.

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Historic Sites

Acton State Historic Site

Granbury

The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

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A brick-paved street in the Fort Worth Stockyards under a cloudy sky, with two riders on horseback at left, the Stockyards Station sign down the street and a red-roofed building with wooden pens at right.

Fort Worth Stockyards

Fort Worth

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.

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Towns & Gateways

A shingle-roofed gazebo in Chandor Gardens behind a bed of red roses and clipped shrubs, with magnolia trees rising behind and a rock-edged lawn in front.

Chandor Gardens

Weatherford

A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.

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The Kimbell Art Museum's travertine and concrete cycloid vaults, with an open vaulted porch beside a long reflecting pool under live oaks and a deep blue sky.

Kimbell Art Museum

Fort Worth

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.

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National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame

Fort Worth

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.

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Architecture

The Hood County Courthouse in Granbury, a three-story limestone Second Empire building with a slate mansard roof and a tall clock tower, seen across the square under a clear blue sky.

Granbury Courthouse Square

Granbury

A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.

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The south front of the Tarrant County Courthouse in Fort Worth, a pink granite building with arched windows and a domed clock tower, seen over a garden of grasses and red flowers with glass towers behind.

Tarrant County Courthouse

Fort Worth

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.

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Wise County Courthouse

Decatur

J. Riely Gordon's granite Romanesque courthouse of 1895-96 in Decatur, built after fire destroyed the Second Empire courthouse and set off a fight over the county seat.

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Roadside Stops

Dublin Bottling Works

Dublin

The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.

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Fort Worth & the Cross Timbers rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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