Fort Worth

Where the Republic ended and the West began

Fort Worth was a U.S. Army outpost before it was a city. Major Ripley Arnold's soldiers planted the original fort on a bluff above the Trinity River in June 1849, watching for raids from the Comanche and Wichita nations to the west. The army left in 1853. The settlers stayed. By 1856, residents had voted Fort Worth the county seat over neighboring Birdville — an election the losers contested vigorously and lost again on the rematch. The courthouse has stood on that same bluff ever since.

The cattle drives made the town. Between 1866 and the late 1880s, an estimated four million head of longhorn moved up the Chisholm Trail through Fort Worth on the way to Kansas railheads. The drovers needed supplies, stock-yards, and saloons. The town built all three. When the Texas & Pacific Railway finally reached Fort Worth in 1876, the trade reversed — the cattle stopped trailing through and started shipping out, and the Stockyards north of downtown became the largest livestock market between Chicago and the West Coast.

Oil arrived in the 1910s and 1920s; the W.T. Waggoner ranch struck so much crude on a single section that it briefly out-produced Saudi Arabia's first fields. The Air Force came in the 1940s — Carswell Air Force Base, now the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base on the city's west side, has been the quiet economic anchor for eighty years. Lockheed Martin's fighter plant in west Fort Worth has built every F-16 and F-35 to ever leave a U.S. assembly line. The city's growth was always industrial first, hospitality second.

Modern Fort Worth, by the numbers

The 2020 census put Fort Worth at 918,915. The American Community Survey's 2024 estimate is roughly 996,000, which would make Fort Worth the 13th-largest city in the United States — bigger than Indianapolis, Seattle, Denver, or Washington, D.C. The growth comes from the same places it always has in Texas: net domestic migration from California, Illinois, and the Northeast; net international migration from Mexico, India, and Vietnam; and internal regional moves out of the older parts of Dallas and into the cheaper greenfield north and southwest of the Trinity.

Fort Worth ISD enrolls about 70,000 students — roughly the size of Boston Public Schools — across 142 campuses. The district is the largest single employer of any unit of government in the city other than the federal contractors. Five additional ISDs touch the city limits: Eagle Mountain-Saginaw on the north, Crowley on the south, Keller on the far-northeast, Castleberry and White Settlement on the west, and Northwest ISD's footprint reaches into the Alliance corridor.

The city's economic base used to be summed up as "cattle, oil, and Lockheed." That's still true, but it's now also healthcare (Texas Health Resources is headquartered in Arlington but its biggest single hospital cluster sits on Hemphill in Fort Worth), finance and back-office (Bank of America's Plaza tower downtown; Charles Schwab's relocated headquarters in Westlake just over the county line), and aerospace logistics (the Alliance Texas inland port north of the city, which moves freight through DFW Airport's secondary cargo operations).

What's coming

The civic projects most likely to define the next five years inside the city limits:

• Panther Island. The 30-year, federally-funded Trinity River realignment finally got its bridge construction back on schedule in 2024 after a decade of delays. The downtown north canal district is the largest urban redevelopment opportunity in Texas — bigger than Dallas's Trinity Trails or the Houston Buffalo Bayou park system.
• Texas A&M-Fort Worth. The new urban research campus on Houston Street is the city's first major research-university footprint downtown. Phase 1 buildings opened in 2024–25; the law school, engineering school, and research labs phase in through 2030.
• TEXRail expansion. The commuter line from DFW Airport to downtown Fort Worth opened in 2019. The TCU/medical district extension and the southside extension to the Stockyards have both moved into engineering as of mid-2025.
• Convention Center expansion. The city committed $700M+ in 2023 to expand and modernize the downtown convention center. Construction is scheduled to run through 2028.

How the city fits into the county

Fort Worth contains the Tarrant County Courthouse, the county jail, the county hospital district's flagship (JPS Health Network), and roughly 45% of the county's residents. Decisions made in the Commissioners Court at 100 East Weatherford Street — five elected officials, four precincts plus the county judge — set tax rates and budgets that touch every other city covered on this site. Tarrant County Desk's civic-government reporting is anchored here.

A note on what Fort Worth isn't: it is not the same as Tarrant County. Roughly half the county's population — and a substantial majority of the county's economic growth in the last decade — lives outside city limits. The HEB cities, the Northeast Tarrant cluster (Keller, Southlake, Colleyville, Grapevine), and the southeast growth in Mansfield and Crowley are all their own civic stories. Fort Worth gets the big headlines. The rest of the county runs its own books.

Connect

• Fort Worth city government: fortworthtexas.gov
• Fort Worth ISD: fwisd.org
• Tarrant County government: tarrantcountytx.gov
• City Council meetings: Tuesdays, 7 PM, City Council Chamber, 200 Texas Street
• Tarrant County Commissioners Court: Tuesdays, 10 AM, 100 East Weatherford Street