Fakes Offered One-Stop Shopping From Coffee Tables to Coffins

It began humbly, selling chairs, china, and coffins in a wooden building of 1,440 square feet. But over the course of ninety-one years it would become one of the biggest furniture wholesale and retail stores in the Southwest.

William Thomas Fakes was born in Tennessee in 1853. His father was a farmer. William Thomas moved to Fort Worth in 1874 at age nineteen.

In 1876, six weeks after the first train arrived in Fort Worth, the Daily Democrat announced that William Thomas Fakes would open W. Fakes & Co. on Houston Street. The “& Co.” was partner William G. Turner. The store would sell furniture, Queensware (cream-colored earthenware), and “undertaker’s goods.”

In 1876 most funerals were arranged by the family of the deceased and conducted in a residence, usually the home of the deceased. Professional undertakers conducting funerals in funeral homes were not yet common. The 1877 Fort Worth city directory lists no undertakers.

Also in 1876 William Fakes’s brother Bailey Payton Fakes, born in Tennessee in 1857, moved to Fort Worth to join his older brother’s business. The Fakes brothers sold “celebrated Crane & Breed’s metallic coffins and caskets” and “coffins made to order on short notice.”

William boarded at the Transcontinental Hotel.

By 1878 the Fakes brothers were not only selling undertaking paraphernalia but also providing undertaking services. The city directory now listed three undertaking companies. Soon Fakes would compete with another early Fort Worth undertaker—George Gause.

The Fakes brothers and Gause were members of two professions that made a natural transition to undertaking: (1) Makers and sellers of wooden furniture also made and sold another wooden product—coffins—and thus expanded their services to undertaking. (2) Likewise, livery stable operators, who provided horses and carriages used in funeral processions, expanded their services to undertaking. George Gause had operated a livery stable.

In 1885 one of the Fakes company clerks was Louis P. Robertson.

In 1888 the Fakes brothers were still in the undertaking business. But the Fakes soon sold their undertaking business to Robertson, who established L. P. Robertson Undertaker, which evolved into today’s Robertson-Harper-Mueller funeral home.

Business was good for the Fakes brothers. William Thomas Fakes was one of the early residents of Quality Hill, living on Summit Avenue between Front (Lancaster) and Railroad (Vickery) streets.

The year 1889 brought an end and a beginning: William Fakes ended his financial association with the company and went into the real estate business, and brother Bailey opened a second Fakes store—in Dallas.

By 1899 the Fakes company was no longer in the undertaking business, but officers of the company maintained a connection to undertaking as state managers of the Ohio Valley Coffin Company of Indiana.

Like most of the long-lived downtown department stores, over the years the Fakes company relocated to ever-larger buildings as business increased. The first Fakes store measured twenty-four feet wide and sixty feet long. Fakes stores would occupy eight buildings downtown, including one built for the company by Khleber Miller Van Zandt.

Bailey Payton Fakes died in 1895 at the age of thirty-eight. Brother William moved to Dallas to run his brother’s store.

Bailey Fakes is buried in Fort Worth’s Oakwood Cemetery.

William Thomas Fakes died in 1909.

He is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Dallas.

The business survived the loss of its founding brothers and continued to evolve. After the Fakes warehouse on Commerce Street burned in 1924 the company took over the Montgomery Ward building on East 7th Street after Ward’s relocated to the old Chevy plant on West 7th Street. The Fakes warehouse had a woodworking shop where craftsmen could make parts to mend broken furniture or fashion new furniture to match an existing piece. Workers also refinished furniture. The warehouse was served by a spur of the Rock Island railroad that ran down East 7th Street.

In 1924 Fakes sales were nearly $200,000 ($3 million today).

By 1925 the founders of the Fakes company were gone. Fred A. Martin had been president since 1921. John Laneri was vice president. In 1925 Fakes moved into one of the gems of architects Sanguinet and Staats: the Fort Worth Club Building. The Fort Worth Club occupied the top floors of the building: a fifty-by-ninety-five-foot ballroom, main dining room, private dining rooms, men’s club rooms, women’s club rooms, billiard room, library, gymnasium, handball court, barbershop, and forty-four bedrooms, including eight suites (one of them occupied by Amon Carter).

The Star-Telegram published a sixteen-page special section detailing the new store, which occupied the bottom five floors of the building:

First floor: objets d’art and occasional pieces, statuary, drapery sales department, domestic and Oriental rugs, Victrola and phonograph department. The company boasted that its first-floor display area was the “largest in the U.S.” at eighteen thousand square feet.

Second floor: a completely furnished five-room cottage, which was refurnished each week; linoleum and congoleum flooring department; moderately priced furniture for every room, including furniture made by the Hub Furniture Company in Glenwood.

Third floor: a furnished eight-room house, living room furniture and pictures, the Hall of Mirrors and Lamps.

Fourth floor: bedroom and dining room sample groups.

Fifth floor: gas and electric stoves, kitchen cabinets and tables. The fifth floor also displayed trade-in furniture and housed workshops to make draperies, upholster furniture, and sew carpets. (The huge rug in the lobby of the Hotel Texas was supplied by Fakes.)

The Fakes company knew how to get publicity. In 1929 Fakes decorated C. A. O’Keefe’s new Blackstone Hotel.

And in 1948 Fakes furnished the house on Arundel Avenue that was built to promote the Cary Grant film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. 

The company also knew how to get people into the store: by being a outlet for ticket sales to appearances by such celebrities as John Philip Sousa, Ignacy Paderewski, Clarence Darrow, and Ethel Barrymore. Note that three of the four appeared at Central High School.

By the time Ethel Barrymore came to town, Central High School had been renamed for principal R. L. Paschal.

In 1946 Fakes downsized, relocating to 406 Houston Street.

The building on Houston Street had been built in 1929 for the J. C. Penney Company. In 1946, after Fakes vacated the Fort Worth Club Building, R. E. Cox & Company moved in and stayed until 1955.

But wait! Let’s play more musical department stores: Today 406 Houston Street is part of the adjacent Sanger Lofts, which originally housed a Sanger’s department store.

In 1953 the Fakes store in Dallas closed after sixty-four years.

In 1955 Fakes, as was the trend among downtown department stores, opened a branch store, this one at 1401 Ayers Street at East Rosedale Street in Poly.

Here is a sample of Fakes advertising at ten-year intervals:

In 1941.

In 1951.

In 1961.

In 1967 the Fakes company, after ninety-one years, went out of business.

Its stock was sold at auction.

The owners of Robertson-Mueller-Harper funeral home remembered Fakes as the source of its origin when Louis P. Robertson bought Fakes’s undertaking business.

Today at the intersection of East Rosedale and Ayers streets, 145 years after William Thomas Fakes sold his first coffin, a sign still directs shoppers to a building that was torn down in the 1990s after housing a furniture store that closed in 1967.

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2 Responses to Fakes Offered One-Stop Shopping From Coffee Tables to Coffins

  1. Ed Bodiford says:

    Thanks for the article providing some of the history of Fort Worth, TX. Roberton, Muller, and Harper Funeral Home has a close relation to our family. Robert “Bob” Greer, my father-in-law worked for RMH prior to WWII along with Guy Thompson, of recent memory. After WWII, Bob returned to Fort Worth and continued to work for RMH until joining Coke-Cola as a route salesman. He continued to work for the Coke Company until he retired in the early 80’s. After retirement he returned to RMH and worked there until he finally retired in 1999. My wife and I have their Master Bedroom Suite in our guestroom which came from Fakes and Company. We don’t know the year because Bob’s brother and sister-in-law purchased it originally.

    This article brings to light just a part of the golden years of Fort Worth which continues to grow and prosper.

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