College Avenue in Fort Worth has no college. It wasn’t always that way

Often we don’t stop to wonder how streets got their name. Take, for example, College Avenue, which stretches from Vickery Boulevard south to Felix Street in Fort Worth but doesn’t come close to so much as a barber college.

Ah, but for 30 years it did. From 1881 to 1911 the block at the intersection of College Avenue and Cannon Street was occupied by the campus of a college, founded as Texas Wesleyan College by the northern branch of the Methodist Church.

The Rev. A. A. Johnson and William H. Cannon bought 40 acres on the sparsely settled near South Side and sold lots on part of the land to finance construction of the college campus on the remainder of the acreage. (Cannon Street is named for Cannon, the first president of the college.)

In 1889, Texas Wesleyan College changed its name to Fort Worth University.

Fort Worth University was small but robust. College President Oscar L. Fisher advertised, “Increase your knowledge, your brain power, and thereby your capital by study in one of our schools. Fifty-one teachers, eight hundred students. Military school for boys. Homelike accommodations for girls. Expenses moderate.”

In 1903, tuition was less than $200 ($5,700 today). Room and board were $3.50 ($100 today) a week.

The Fort Worth University campus had four main buildings: Dining Hall, Science Hall, University Hall and Cadet Hall. The college offered such arts and sciences courses as modern languages, business, instrumental and vocal music, drawing and painting, elocution, mathematics, Latin and Greek, biology, chemistry and astronomy.

Degrees granted included AB, BS, BLitt, DD and PhD.

Outdoor activities included baseball, croquet, lawn tennis and football.

For example, on Nov. 26, 1903, Fort Worth University beat Polytechnic College (which would become today’s Texas Wesleyan University) in football.

Of course, Fort Worth University published a yearbook: “The Lasso.” Each class had its own colors and yell. The senior class colors were navy blue and gold. The senior class yell was:

“Ring! Rah! Ru!

Do your do!

Varsity! Varsity?

Fort Worth U!”

Fort Worth U continued to be ambitious. It opened a school of law in 1893 and a school of medicine in 1894.

The medical school was originally on the College Avenue campus, but in 1896 moved to a building downtown at Commerce and East 7th streets.

On April 1, 1897, the medical school graduated its first class of students who had gone through the entire three-year medical course at Fort Worth University.

That graduating class was a dozen students, including Frances Daisy Emery Allen. Allen, a graduate of Fort Worth High School, graduated second in her class at the medical college, and was the first woman to graduate from a Texas medical school. She taught at the medical college and was on the staff of Harris, All Saints and St. Joseph’s hospitals.

In 1903, tuition at the medical college, “including matriculation fee, dissecting ticket, chemical and pathological laboratories,” was $75 ($2,200 today) a year.

In 1911, when an attempted merger of Fort Worth University and Polytechnic College failed, Fort Worth University instead became part of Methodist University of Oklahoma. The campus on College Avenue closed.

“Do your do!” was done.

In 1917, the city of Fort Worth demolished the last building of the College Avenue campus to build Fort Worth High School (now Green B. Trimble Technical High School).

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.

This story was originally published February 22, 2020 at 7:00 AM.