Fort Worth

In May 1849, the United States Army established a garrison on a bluff above the Trinity River in north Texas and named it for Brevet Major General William Jenkins Worth. Worth had died three weeks earlier in San Antonio, taken by cholera at fifty-four, never seeing the post that would carry his name. The fort existed partly because of the war Worth had helped win: the conflict with Mexico that transferred most of the American Southwest to the United States. The timing was grim but not unusual. Post-war America named things quickly, after men who had just stopped being useful.

William Worth was born in 1794 in Hudson, New York, and spent his life moving between wars. He served as aide-de-camp to Winfield Scott in the War of 1812, commanded a division at Monterrey in 1846, and marched with Scott's army toward Mexico City in 1847. His surname traces to Old English 'worð,' meaning an enclosed homestead or estate, a root that survives in British place names: Tamworth, Haworth, Kenilworth. Worth the general was celebrated in his lifetime; Worth the place name was an artifact of grief and administration.

The garrison was short-lived as a military post, abandoned in 1853 when the frontier pushed further west. The settlers who stayed behind were mostly cattle ranchers, and when the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad arrived in the 1870s, Fort Worth became a waystation for cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail. The stockyards that opened in 1887 made it the principal livestock market in the southwestern United States. The 'Fort' remained even after the last soldier departed, preserved in the name the way amber preserves an insect.

Fort Worth today has a population of roughly 900,000, a museum district along the Trinity River that includes the Kimbell Art Museum, and one of the largest urban stockyards still in operation. The name still carries both syllables of its origin: 'fort' for a garrison that lasted four years and 'worth' for a general who died three weeks before he could arrive. American cities named for people are small arguments about who gets remembered; Fort Worth is the case of a man whose name outlasted him by 170 years.