Articles from the Daily Fort Worth Standard of 1877 show what life was like in Cowtown 136 years ago.
Two facts about life in Fort Worth in 1877: Life was hard. Life was simple. So, what did Cowtowners do for entertainment?
Cowtowners could, of course, take themselves out to the ball game, maybe take in a road game in Weatherford. The player Swasey mentioned was Charles James Swasey (1847-1939), who would later live on Chase Court. Before moving to Fort Worth, Swasey had in the late 1860s played infield for two early baseball teams: the Chicago Excelsiors and the Forest City Club of Rockford, Illinois.
Residents could take in a little Dickens. In 1877 The Old Curiosity Shop had been in print only thirty-seven years.
The more musically minded formed the Philharmonic Society that year.
In 1876 merchant Burwell Christmas Evans had given customers something new: On the second floor of his store he had opened Fort Worth’s first respectable theater. In Evans’s Hall residents could see such acts as the Heywood brothers’ “refined minstrelsy” and “vaudeville and specialty company” and the distinguished comedian John Thompson, whose music was directed by “Miss Mollie Thompson, 8 years of age, the youngest musical directress in the world.”
Of course, there were holidays set aside for entertainment. This report on the local May Day celebration chronicles the “enjoyments” as the “deities of spring” and the Reverends Ashford, Neathery, and Arnold held sway. The prose of this report is so flowery that only FTD’s Mercury Man could diagram its sentences.
But just ten days after May Day, what could match the extravaganza that was W. W. Cole’s Greater New York and New Orleans Zoological Exposition, Menagerie, Aquarium, Aviary, and Animals? You are left breathless just reading the name of the show. Cole promised forty-five railroad cars laden with bactrian camels, oceanic lions, monkeys, walruses, baby elephants, a hippopotamus, “horses in splendid condition.” Only Noah himself could top that.
All that and a gorgeous street pageant and the daily ascent of the City of Paris “mammoth airship.”
Let’s see the Reverends Ashford, Neathery, and Arnold reduplicate those enjoyments!
