He carved Mt. Rushmore, was signed for a project in Fort Worth. But it never happened
Gutzon Borglum, the artist who carved the colossal sculpture of four American presidents on Mt. Rushmore, was commissioned in 1927 to create a mammoth Confederate monument behind the Tarrant County Courthouse, overlooking the twin forks in the Trinity River.
The sculptor, a veritable rock star, envisioned a 30-foot-tall bronze of Gen. Robert E. Lee astride his horse, surveying a granite base with Rebel soldiers on the march and the chiseled names of Fort Worth’s Confederate veterans. The approach to the monument was to be a pink granite stairway as wide as North Main Street, terraced 24-feet into an oval-shaped median on the bluff called Paddock Park.
The proposal won approval from the Park Board and the public, which welcomed the world-famous artist to the Fat Stock Show, the TCU campus, and a Woman’s Club luncheon at Anna Shelton Hall. The Julia Jackson Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy drew up a five-page, $120,000 contract with Borglum on May 30, 1927, and wired him a $5,000 advance. Scale models went on public display.
Borglum, a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer who had worked with the KKK to plan a Lost Cause monument in Stone Mountain, Ga., told the Record-Telegram that his Fort Worth tableau would “commemorate not a man but a movement in history.”
Despite local enthusiasm and political support, the United Daughters of the Confederacy could not raise $120,000 for the sculpture. “They broke the contract with Borglum,” wrote Kelly McMichael, author of the book “Sacred Memories: The Civil War Monument Movement in Texas.”
Given today’s climate of racial discord and toppling statues, reminders of this forgotten footnote to Fort Worth history are likely to elicit sighs of relief. Imagine Robert E. Lee tumbling into the Trinity.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Trinity River vision of 1927 never came to fruition. It is one of several proposals advanced over the past century for the Courthouse’s north vista, which has proven to be a precarious perch for monuments and ideas.
The strategic bluff on the Trinity was initially the site of the military camp, established in 1849, for which the city is named. From that ridge, lookouts could spot Comanche and Kiowa campfires as far north as present-day Oklahoma.
In 1895 the Tarrant County Courthouse, a French Renaissance Revival gem, was constructed on the bluff. The building’s north entrance, above the lush Trinity River Valley, seemed an ideal space for parkland and a plaza to enhance the view.
In 1909, the Park Board hired George E. Kessler, landscape architect for the St. Louis World’s Fair, to design a comprehensive park system, says historian Susan Allen Kline, author of “Fort Worth Parks.” Kessler advised the city to buy all the land from the courthouse down to the riverbank and terrace it with a fountain, native vegetation and scenic roads. But the only land acquired was Paddock Park, an oval median, eight-tenths of an acre, across the street from the courthouse.
The city’s next landscape consultant, S. Herbert Hare, hired in 1925, gave a nod to the Confederate tableau. Although Gutzon Borglum’s proposal fell through, Hare’s landscape sketch shows a series of steps in Paddock Park leading to a plaza with a generic statue. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration completed Hare’s plan for Paddock Park — with nine steps below and nine steps above a central plaza suitable for a monument. The width of the steps, as Borglum had proposed, is the width of North Main Street.
The stage was set, yet Paddock Park sat vacant until 1981.
Charles Tandy, the entrepreneur who brought Radio Shack to Fort Worth and revitalized the downtown, had died in 1978. A Tandy Memorial Fund commissioned a $30,000, 9-foot-tall, bronze of the philanthropist by western artist Jim Reno. The statue depicts Tandy dressed in a business suit, with one hand in his pocket and the other holding his trademark cigar. The Fort Worth Art Commission and Department of Parks and Recreation agreed that a statue honoring the electronics entrepreneur was appropriate for the setting and would aesthetically frame the courthouse’s north vista.
The Tandy statue was dedicated April 15, 1981. However, it drew few visitors, for Paddock Park is surrounded by two-to-four lanes of vehicular traffic, with no easy access for pedestrians.
Still, there were optimistic proposals to link Tandy’s perch with Heritage Plaza across the street, despite the traffic separating the sites. Designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, Heritage Plaza is a series of spaces unified by water features. But it, too, was underutilized. Hidden amid foliage, it was a magnet for the homeless. In 2007 the city fenced off the plaza, locked it shut, and turned off the water. In 2008 it made Historic Fort Worth Inc.’s list of Most Endangered Places.
Charles Tandy’s statue, criticized as increasingly irrelevant and out of scale, was moved to TCU in 2009 and placed in front of the campus’ Tandy Hall.
Meanwhile, a new Trinity River Vision had gained proponents. A mammoth, inter-agency public works project, the current vision does not include Paddock Park or Heritage Plaza in its billion-dollar budget. It proposes reshaping the twin forks below the river bluff with a lake, an island, and a bypass channel. Will it come to fruition? Not if history repeats itself, for, beginning with Robert E. Lee, Trinity River visions have turned into lost causes.
Hollace Ava Weiner, a former Star-Telegram reporter, is an author and archivist.
This story was originally published August 1, 2020 at 7:00 AM.