Still like the name White Settlement Road? Read about the lynchings and the slaves
Nothing is settled about White Settlement Road.
In local history books, the name is a benign reference to Fort Worth’s frontier past.
But before the Civil War, the old wagon road served large farms settled in American Indian territory by some of Tarrant County’s largest slave owners.
Seventy slaves, maybe more, worked 2 miles from today’s downtown on White Settlement Road. That farm is now a cemetery.
In 1860, two whites — one a Missouri minister — were lynched and hanged off White Settlement Road near town, accused of opposing slavery and organizing resistance.
In Fort Worth, White Settlement Road is also White Lynching Road.
I am not the least bit concerned that we keep a road with the same name as some other city and school system 9 miles west.
Let them promote that name.
Fort Worth’s road is better off with something different.
The murder of the Rev. Anthony Bewley, 56, a Methodist, by a “Fort Worth Vigilance Committee” made shocking headlines nationwide amid a statewide panic on the cusp of secession and the Civil War.
Bewley, a pastor from his church’s northern branch with a small church in Johnson County and others to the south, had heeded warnings to go north again when he was tracked down in Missouri and hauled back to be killed Sept. 13, 1860.
The hanging is described in gruesome terms even for that day.
Left danging from a pecan tree for a day, his body was half-buried with his knees sticking out, then moved to a store’s roof where children played with his bones throughout the Civil War.
Bewley was hanged two months after a Fort Worth bricklayer from Minnesota, William H. Crawford, 39, was lynched and hanged from the same tree. It was described as 300 yards west of the turn at today’s Henderson Street.
A year later, Crawford’s widow wrote in a Minnesota newspaper about their time in Fort Worth:
“We were much disappointed with both the country and the society,” Mary Crawford wrote.
“The wealthiest and most intelligent people were the slaveholders. ... Men went about wearing pistols and Bowie knives openly, and it was a common thing to hear of a man being shot without any notice taken of it by the authorities.”
She accused early Fort Worth settler Charles Turner of tricking her husband to his death.
Turner was the owner of 70 slaves or more and the 640-acre farm on White Settlement Road where Greenwood Cemetery is now. The big oak tree in the entryway marked the Turner home.
(Turner replied that he wasn’t involved and “nobody here knows or wants to know. But all as one man .... endorse most heartily their act.”)
In 2004, Bewley’s descendants, several of them Nazarene ministers, gathered in the 1900 block of White Settlement Road to remember their pastor ancestor.
“He laid down his life for what he believed,” said descendant Roy Darden of Fort Worth, then 86.
I am not suggesting in any way that White Settlement Road or the new overpass at the site should be named for Bewley or Crawford. Both were area residents for only a short time.
But we have modern-day heroes who taught Fort Worth to take a better road.
This story was originally published August 14, 2021 at 11:40 AM.
