How Fort Worth's Cattle Barons Built a Hill of Mansions and Then Tore Them Down: Quality Hill

In 1907, a Fort Worth cotton man built a 37-room mansion with a gymnasium, a fountain in the solarium, twelve intercom phones and, the story goes, a vault for 600 bottles of champagne. Today the spot is a parking lot. Quality Hill was Fort Worth's Gilded Age neighborhood, a hill of mansions just southwest of downtown, built by the cattle barons who made Cowtown rich. Tom Waggoner ran a ranch of more than a million acres and struck oil while drilling for water. Burk Burnett built the Four Sixes from a hundred cows. Winfield Scott arrived unable to read, started out chopping wood, became the city's largest taxpayer, and bought Thistle Hill for $90,000 but died before he could move in. Then the money moved on, the mansions became boarding houses and funeral homes, and from 1950 to 1965 the wrecking ball took almost all of them. 1965 was the worst year: the Waggoner mansion, the Ellison house and the Van Zandt house all came down. This is the story of how Fort Worth's cattle barons built a hill of palaces, and why only a handful are still standing, one of them now with "parking garages on either side." Do you remember Quality Hill before the mansions came down? Tell us in the comments. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Champagne Vault 2:01 Where the West Begins 5:21 The Kings of the Hill 10:27 Electra's Honeymoon House 12:12 The Woodchopper's Palace 14:35 Behind Closed Doors 17:01 The Money Moves On 20:26 The Wrecking Ball 23:06 The Last Houses on the Hill 27:12 What the Hill Was For SOURCES Hometown by Handlebar – Silk Hats and Spats: The Residences of Quality Hill (Demolished): https://hometownbyhandlebar.com/p-25682/ Hometown by Handlebar – Great Scott: From Ax-Slinger to Goldfinger: https://hometownbyhandlebar.com/p-549/ Handbook of Texas (TSHA) – Thistle Hill: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/thistle-hill Handbook of Texas (TSHA) – Waggoner Ranch: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/waggoner-ranch Handbook of Texas (TSHA) – Arlington Downs Racetrack: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/arlington-downs-racetrack Fort Worth Business Press – Historic Fort Worth Donates Thistle Hill to Cook Children's (2022): https://fortworthbusiness.com/nonprofit/historic-fort-worth-donates-thistle-hill-to-cook-childrens%EF%BF%BC/ Texas Monthly – Showdown at Waggoner Ranch: https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/showdown-at-waggoner-ranch/ Mary Couts Burnett: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Couts_Burnett #FortWorth #TexasHistory #Mansions