Debate about White Settlement Road isn’t Fort Worth’s first dust-up over street names
The recent uproar over changing the name of White Settlement Road reminds us that changing street names in Fort Worth is nothing new. The city commission, newly installed as the city’s governing body, went on a name-changing spree in 1909. The biggest controversy arose over changing Rusk Street to Commerce Street. It had been Rusk for going on 40 years.
Rusk was originally named, like other downtown streets, for heroes of the South and specifically, of the Texas revolution: Thomas J. Rusk, Sam Houston, David Burnett, Anson Jones, James W. Throckmorton, Mirabeau Lamar, Zachary Taylor and John C. Calhoun. By the early 20th century, Rusk stretched from the Swift and Armour packing houses in North Fort Worth to the growing residential district south of the Texas & Pacific railroad reservation.
For reasons that are unclear, in 1903 the city council changed the name of South Rusk to Bryan in honor of Populist Party spokesman and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. All it took to make the change was agreement by the council to pass the necessary ordinance. Not all the street’s residents agreed with the change. Jake Huber, who had lived on the street since 1878, was still steaming about it six years later when the city commission (formerly the council) took up the question of renaming the rest of Rusk.
It started with a petition by respectable property owners on the street who were tired of it being known as the main vice thoroughfare through Hell’s Half-acre. It had more than its share of saloons, dance halls, and bordellos. It was the Wild West within just one block of Main Street. They were galvanized to clean up the image of their street once the city put in sewer lines and brick paving, and announced plans to put up street signs on the cross streets.
Big plans for commercial development were also in the works, including new buildings, one of which was to be a major expansion of the Metropolitan Hotel (entrance on Main Street). The property owners presented their petition to the commission requesting a name change from “Rusk” to “Commerce.” The names on the petition guaranteed a friendly reception at city hall: Alphonse and Leopold August, E.D. Farmer, L.L. Hawes, Ed Seibold, Fakes & Co., and Fort Worth Power & Light. Petitioners predicted if the name were changed, “Commerce will become in time one of the finest business streets in the state.”
Not everyone agreed with the proposed change and what amounted to the snubbing of a beloved Texas hero. Several of the most prominent men in the city came out against it, including E.B. Daggett, son of the man known as “the Father of Fort Worth,” and C.C. Cummings, the first county judge and self-styled historian of the city. They filed their opposing petition, reminding commissioners of the noble history of Fort Worth street names. “This dropping of the names of the old heroes and the assumption of mercenary titles like ‘Commerce’ is a dangerous precedent,” they warned.
Cummings, in an address to the R.E. Lee Camp of Confederate Veterans, sneeringly referred to city fathers as, “our commercial city commission,” and said, “Boards of Trade [are] slack in memory.” Judge J.E. Martin, another signer, followed up with a personal letter that closed with, “Let the name of Rusk Street remain in perpetual honor of one of the greatest factors in delivering Texas from the barbarous and tyrannical hands of Lopez de Santa Anna!”
City fathers weren’t swayed. On Dec. 14 they formally approved the name change to “Commerce.” Henceforward, the ordinance said, the street “will bear that name from the packing houses to the Texas and Pacific Depot.” Shrewdly, they placed all the responsibility squarely on “property owners.” They were simply enacting the wishes of the people.
Rusk may have been the most cussed and discussed renaming, but it was not the only street to undergo a name change in 1909. James Hays Quarles Street, Neil Snyder Street, Hackberry Street, and Hill Street also got new names: Trinity Avenue, Snyder Street, Ballinger Street, and Summit Avenue. respectively. The reasons for the changes were practical, not partisan. “James Hays Quarles” was “simply too long” to fit on a street sign. “Summit” was considered more evocative for the silk-stocking street that was home to some of Fort Worth’s most prestigious families.
Eventually, of course, the uproar died down. Opponents of the name changes died or moved on to other issues. Business considerations had won out over history, as always. White Settlement Road may soon have a new name, and in a few years no one will remember that it once had a different name. After all, who cares that Trinity Boulevard (on the North Side) was once James Hays Quarles Street?
Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.