Think you know where the Foundry District is in Fort Worth? You may want to think again

Readers of this newspaper have seen the name “Foundry District” used in reference to the recent development of the West Seventh Street corridor.

Before redevelopment, the area just north of Montgomery Plaza was variously characterized as an “unloved industrial district” and “bar district.” Neither description is accurate because West Seventh Street was never part of the old Foundry District.

No one has really answered the questions, “What and where was the Foundry District, and what is the story behind Stove Foundry Road (now Vickery Boulevard)?”

The namesake stove foundry was literally a plant for manufacturing old-fashioned, wood-burning stoves, for which there was a big market in the late 19th century. Fort Worth was booming in 1890 and happy to get the plant as a key piece of its drive to industrialize. The stove foundry was a first-class operation with its own artesian water well and a full line of commercial products. Even before it opened, the plant, valued at $60,000, already had orders on the books worth several thousand dollars.

The plant was located just north of the International & Great Northern tracks near the railroad roundhouse, close to where the Union Pacific shops are today. It sat on a dirt road about two miles west of the city and south of Arlington Heights.

Hopes for the foundry’s success were so high that the previous year an investment group had purchased property around it to build housing. They platted it into lots and came up with a bucolic sounding name, “Brooklyn Heights.” The developers, McAnulty & Nesbit, were still getting organized when they sold the first 12 lots (40 feet by 120 feet) for $125 each. They promised buyers that an electric streetcar was in their plans to connect Brooklyn Heights to downtown.

The future was bright until a national depression hit in 1895. Four years later, the stove foundry closed, leaving citizens shocked and puzzled. The foundry’s furnaces remained cold, and the building sat empty for the next seven years, though the road to it was still known as Stove Foundry Road, and the subdivision lived on.

On the south end, the road connected Fort Worth to Benbrook. On the north end, it crossed the Clear Fork of the Trinity on a rickety wooden bridge that connected Stove Foundry Road to Railroad Avenue. For a variety of reasons, electric streetcar service never extended to Stove Foundry Road.

In 1906, the foundry equipment was bought by a scrap-iron dealer and shipped to Dallas to be recycled as “old iron.” However, Fort Worth was not done with stove foundries yet. Two years later, a Georgia entrepreneur promised to build a factory on the east side of the city if he could raise $10,000 in subscriptions from businesses and private citizens in Fort Worth.

By that date, there were enough residents in the Foundry District to be a neighborhood with its own schoolhouse, churches, and, briefly, a saloon. In May 1906, the unincorporated district voted to go “dry” by a margin of 30 to 7, setting a different path than its big sister city.

Despite limited success, Fort Worth was still determined to reinvent itself as an industrial city. In 1906, a group of prominent businessmen formed the Factory Club to bring more manufacturing to the city. They set their sights on creating an industrial district on Stove Foundry Road to capitalize on the nearby railroad connections and abundant water supply. One of their first successes was getting Fred Axtell to move his windmill factory into the old stove foundry building. It was followed by a knitting mill, a cotton mill, a paper-box-making factory, and a glass-making factory.

All those workers and their families needed a place to live, which caused Brooklyn Heights’ sales to boom. The developers bought an additional 350 acres just north of Stove Foundry Road to carve into additional modestly priced residential lots.

The 1908 flood washed away a lot of dreams as well as washing out the wooden bridge connecting Stove Foundry Road to the city. For several months, the only connection Brooklyn Heights residents had to downtown was Seventh Street, until the county replaced the old bridge with a sturdy iron structure 160 feet long.

The next big change to the Foundry District came when the International & Great Northern Railroad was bought by the Texas & Pacific Railroad.

Eventually, Brooklyn Heights stretched from Stove Foundry Road on the south to Byers on the north, and from Clover Lane on the west to Montgomery Street on the east. When Fort Worth began absorbing unincorporated communities all around it in 1909, Brooklyn Heights residents weren’t interested. They still weren’t interested in being annexed 15 years later after Fort Worth had taken over North Fort Worth, Polytechnic, Riverside, and other suburbs. Brooklyn Heights/the Foundry District continued to exist in the shadow of metropolitan Fort Worth for a few more years. It had no municipal government or police force, but it still had its own school and churches that doubled as community centers.

In the 1930s, the Foundry District finally lost its proud, independent status. In 1935, the state’s local option law allowed Tarrant County to decide for every community in its borders whether to be “wet” or “dry.” The Foundry District had been stubbornly dry since even before National Prohibition and wanted to remain that way after it was repealed. But now, with the stroke of a pen, it became “wet.”

Another blow to independent status came when the city renamed its central artery Vickery Boulevard after Richard L. Vickery, the English-born developer who had bought large tracts of land on the east side and put up “for sale” signs early in the century. The street formerly known as Railroad Avenue, stretching from the T&P station to the Foundry District, became West Vickery Boulevard, passing through the Foundry District/Brooklyn Heights all the way to Benbrook. The transformation was complete.

The county finally addressed the transportation needs of the area in 1949. The old Stove Foundry Road had long been a narrow, macadamized track until the 1949 flood washed much of it out. With the Benbrook dam scheduled for completion that same year and traffic on the road reaching 800 cars daily, it was time to turn West Vickery into a modern thoroughfare by widening and paving it. The necessary $12,000 was secured through a bond issue, and the work was completed by the end of June 1950, creating an asphalt two-lane road all the way from University Drive to Benbrook.

Today the Foundry District is a name loosely applied to everything from the West Freeway or even Seventh Street to the Union Pacific rail yards and from University Drive to Ridglea Boulevard. Truth be told, it was never that extensive. Though called a “district” or “addition,” it was never more than a pocket just west of the railroad tracks that still run beside Vickery Boulevard.

It took a new generation of developers to revive the historic name for their neighborhood branding in 2015. A couple of creative types (M2G Ventures) appropriated the name for the old warehouse district behind Montgomery Plaza, redeveloping the area as an arts and upscale retail district. They have since sold it to a North Carolina real estate firm, so the “Foundry District” lives on in a funky way that has no historical or geographical connection to Stove Foundry Road or the original Foundry District.

Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.