On the last day of the year a century ago, these ads and articles appeared in the Star-Telegram:
Fort Worth was about to get two new bridges: the West 7th Street bridge (replaced in 2014) and the Paddock viaduct on North Main Street.
Houston Street was about to be paved.
For a dollar you could ride the interurban to Dallas and back.
Joseph K. Turner (1844-1899, born in Indiana) opened his grocery store in Fort Worth in 1878. Arthur Seeley Dingee (1862-1932, born in Canada) joined Turner in 1886. By the 1920s the Turner & Dingee firm had a chain of a dozen stores. The last store closed in 1986. You might remember the store on West 7th at Macon downtown. That building was torn down in the 1980s to put up a church parking lot.
The Mazda light bulb was patented by General Electric in 1909. (Bottom ad from Popular Science Monthly.)
Then, as now, people made New Year’s resolutions, overcelebrated, and resolved to never, ever overcelebrate again. Note the custom of engineers blowing the whistles and ringing the bells of steam locomotives at midnight.
Police court judge B. D. Shropshire warned overcelebrants that he would not be swayed by their New Year’s resolution to go on the water wagon.
