Fort Worth chips in $200k for Tarrant County Vietnam War Memorial off Camp Bowie Blvd
Fort Worth decided April 8 to contribute $200,000 toward the construction of a Vietnam War memorial along Camp Bowie Boulevard.
Council members voted unanimously to chip in for the $355,000 project, an undertaking spearheaded by the Tarrant County Vietnam Memorial Foundation. The group had fundraised $55,000 on its own by early April.
“The amount of money that we want to spend is nothing to honor and remember these people,” William Burgan, a Fort Worth resident who said he’d been drafted but hadn’t deployed to Vietnam, told council members Tuesday evening.
The monument, as envisioned by the foundation, will feature a nine-sided granite base etched with the names of Tarrant residents killed during the war. A “stainless-steel cylindrical tracery of tree branches containing a downward pointing classical sword sculpted in bronze” will top the base.
The structure will be the latest addition to Veteran’s Memorial Park, a half-acre triangular plot across the street from the Arlington Heights United Methodist Church.
The city erected the park’s first military monument in 1950, a red granite homage to soldiers of the 36th Division that fought during World War I. The “Panther Division” drilled and camped at Camp Bowie (the street’s namesake) before deploying to the Western Front, according to the Texas Military Forces Museum.
Fort Worth added a bronze statue commemorating the 36th Division’s World War 2 veterans in 1987.
The Tarrant County Vietnam Memorial Foundation estimates that at least 222 Tarrant County residents fought and died in Vietnam.
The monument honoring them was originally designed by Ryan Scieneaux in 2020, then a freshman at the University of North Texas. The blueprint has since been “refined and modified” by Fort Worth sculptor Michael Pavlovsky, whose works decorate streets and institutions across the city.
