Interested in Fort Worth’s past? Here’s how to find it for free in Star-Telegram archives
It was a real whodunit.
About $6,000 worth of jewelry disappeared from the home of A.B. Wharton, a prominent Fort Worth socialite whose home is now the Thistle Hill House Museum.
Police believe the heist was the work of a professional, someone with intimate knowledge of the Whartons’ home. Their status was so high in Fort Worth, even the chief of police was involved in the investigation. The drama of the caper played out in the pages of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in December 1906. First, a butler was arrested and held overnight but with little evidence. Later, a maid who went by many names was a suspect. She had connections to jewel thieves in Philadelphia, apparently.
The jewels were never found.
“The fact that they could hold someone overnight without evidence back then was really interesting,” said Ruth Karbach, a history buff and former curator at Thistle Hill who has used digital archives to research a wide range of Fort Worth history.
For years much of this history — nearly 70 years of Star-Telegram newspapers — was not easily accessible. Through the Fort Worth Public Library, researchers could access pages from 1897 to 1922 and from 1991 to present. But articles about World War II, the flood of 1949, John F. Kennedy’s visit and the moon landing could only be found through TCU or UT Arlington.
Now more than 120 years worth of Star-Telegram archives are available digitally to anyone with a Fort Worth Public Library card. The city and the Hazel Vaugn Leigh Trust split the $683,000 cost to purchase the archives from 1923 to 1990 from NewsBank, a digital archive company.
“That’s a lot of Fort Worth history,” said Theresa Davis, library spokeswoman. “There were a lot of significant things that happened in our city, state and country in those decades.”
The digital archives are available through the library’s website after a user logs into his or her library account. Pages are searchable by date or key word. A quick search of “flood” and “1949” locates a front-page story about the devastation of that year’s rain.
Fort Worth historian Quentin McGown said he uses the Star-Telegram archive daily and called it an invaluable tool for anyone interested in Fort Worth history.
“Often, a newspaper article is the closest thing we get to a primary source,” he said. “The more accessible the information is, the better it is for everybody.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2019 at 7:00 AM.
