Companion to No. 01 · 1013 Poindexter Street

Samuels Avenue, 1886A man from Milwaukee drew this street. Most of it is gone.

In 1886 an artist named H. Wellge drew Fort Worth from the air and sold prints door to door. In one corner of the sheet he put the North End — Samuels Avenue, the cemetery, a harness-racing track and a dance pavilion. We went looking for those buildings. This is what we found, and what we got wrong on the way.

Engraved 1886 bird's-eye vignette titled North End and Driving Park: Samuels Avenue and Evans Street at left, a cemetery, scattered houses, a fenced oval racing track at right and Cold Spring Road. — **“North End and Driving Park.”** Border vignette from *Fort Worth, Tex., “The Queen of the Prairies,” county seat of Tarrant County 1886* — drawn by H. Wellge, lithographed by Beck & Pauli, published by Norris, Wellge & Co., Milwaukee. Library of Congress, G4034.F7A3 1886 .W4. **Public domain.** · See the whole sheet ↗

What's Actually In It

Four street names, a track, a pavilion

Four street names are legible and no others: SAMUELS AVE, EVANS ST, WOODS, and COLD SPRING ROAD. Samuels and Cold Spring are the same route, labelled at two points along it.

Left of centre is Pioneers Rest Cemetery, the town's first burying ground, at 620 Samuels. At the far right is the Fort Worth Driving Park — chartered in March 1883, opened that November, a board fence around the whole tract and a grandstand flying a flag. It closed around 1889.

And just west of the track sits a long, low building with two cupolas on the roof. That's the pavilion the streetcar company built in 1885 to give people a reason to ride to the end of the line. Sixty feet by a hundred and ten, seats around an oval dance floor, and a saloon doing business in the basement.

Detail of the 1886 vignette: a board-fenced oval with a double rail, horses and sulkies, spectators and a long grandstand flying a flag. — **The Driving Park.** Double-railed oval, sulkies on the track, carriages on Cold Spring Road.

Detail of the 1886 vignette showing a long low building west of the racetrack with two cupolas on its roof. — **The pavilion.** Two cupolas, west of the oval — the same roofline that shows up in photographs twenty years later.

One thing this drawing is not

A survey. Bird's-eye views were sold by subscription, door to door. Prominent buildings got flattered and empty blocks got furnished. It's wonderful for street names and for things drawn large and labelled. It is not reliable for measuring distances or matching individual houses — a lesson we learned the expensive way, below.

Four Houses on One Block

1865 — 1898

Samuels Avenue splits down the middle. The west side is Mulligan Addition — deep lots running six hundred feet back to the West Fork of the Trinity. The east side is Samuels Unrecorded Addition, shallower and tighter. Odd numbers west, even numbers east.

Four nineteenth-century houses on that block are documented. Here is what became of them.

Standing

731 Samuels Avenue

The Bennett-Fenelon House

Built in the 1860s or 70s for David Chapman Bennett, a vice president of Fort Worth National Bank. Italianate, with what one account calls “rhythmic corbels supporting the deep roof eaves” and a front porch on four original Tuscan columns. Richard Selcer calls it “perhaps the oldest house in town still in its original location.”

The Fenelon family held it for roughly a hundred years. It sits on about an acre and a half running down to the river. Today it's Saddlerock Wine & Beer Co. — you can go have a glass in it.

Demolished 2003

About 750 Samuels Avenue

The Foster-Hodgson-Pool House

Built 1882, next door to the Bennett house. Selcer records that it appears on this very map, “between the Garvey and Bennett houses.”

It came down in 2003. If our reading of the drawing is right, the engraving below may be one of the better surviving pictures of it.

Standing

760 Samuels Avenue

The Getzendaner House

Built circa 1885 on the east side — three storeys, a wrap-around porch, a steep gable with decorative shingling. The owners were given a residential rehabilitation award by Historic Fort Worth in 2013 for bringing it back.

It's offices now.

Standing & landmarked

769 Samuels Avenue

The Garvey-Viehl-Kelley House

The initial structure went up in 1884–85; the Queen Anne showpiece — the bell-domed corner turret, the rounded stair tower with stained glass — came in the 1890s.

Built for Lulu Foster Garvey and William B. Garvey. Mrs. Garvey was a descendant of Baldwin L. Samuel, the man the street is named for. After both Garveys died in 1915 it passed to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Buckner Orphans Home; the Viehls bought it in 1918 and Mrs. Viehl lived there until 1958; the Kelleys bought it in 1972.

It is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark and a City of Fort Worth Historic and Cultural Landmark, and it now serves as the office and clubhouse for the apartments built around it.

Note the surnames: Lulu Foster Garvey, next door to the Foster-Hodgson-Pool house. Almost certainly family.

Reading the Row

A reconstruction, not a certainty

Three houses sit in a row on the west side of the drawing, each on a long lot running back toward the river. Going south to north, they line up with the three west-side addresses — and the reason we believe it isn't that the rooflines match.

Annotated detail of the 1886 vignette marking three houses in a row on the west side of Samuels Avenue, numbered 1, 2 and 3, and a fourth larger house across the road marked A. — Three houses on the deep west-side lots, and one across the road on the east side.

Engraved detail of a two-storey house with a long formal walk running from the road to its front porch. — **A long formal walk to the door.** The approach to 731 Samuels is still described that way — a long walkway flanked by urns and shaded by mature oaks.

Engraved detail of a two-storey house with a steep front-facing gable and a finial at the peak. — **Steep gable, finial at the peak.** Substantial, and four years old when this was drawn.

Engraved detail of a small modest house on a large lot. — **Small.** Because in 1886 it was one year old, and its turret was still a decade away.

Why we think this holds

The order is published. Richard Selcer wrote that the Foster-Hodgson-Pool House appears on the 1886 map between the Garvey and Bennett houses. That is exactly the sequence in front of us: Bennett, then Foster-Hodgson-Pool, then Garvey, south to north.

The sizes track the dates. House 1 is substantial — it had been standing twenty years. House 2 is substantial and gabled — four years old. House 3 is small.

And house 3 being small is a prediction, not an observation. The Garvey house's turret and stair tower are 1890s work. In 1886 only the modest 1884–85 core existed. A small house is what ought to be in that spot — and a small house is what's there.

Still not proof

Four things agreeing is a good reconstruction. It is not a document. We have not confirmed this with a historian, a Sanborn sheet or a city directory, and until we do, this page says we think and not it is.

If you know this street and we've got it wrong, please tell us. We'd rather be corrected than quoted.

The One We Couldn't Name

Building A

Engraved detail of a large two-storey house with a low hipped roof and rows of tall narrow windows, standing in a fenced yard. — East side of Samuels, facing the Cold Springs junction.

This is the largest house in the frame and we spent days on it. We proposed it was a streetcar headquarters, a mule barn, a ward school, and the Bennett house. Every one of those was wrong.

It was wrong for a reason we should have seen sooner. No standing building could match it, because it isn't standing.

The house came down. The ground it sat on is Arnold Park now — the city park in the triangle where Samuels Avenue meets Cold Springs Road. There's a playground on it.

What Survived, and Why

1886 → today

Building	Built	Today
Bennett-Fenelon House 731 Samuels	1860s–70s	Standing — a wine bar
Foster-Hodgson-Pool House ~750 Samuels	1882	Demolished 2003
Getzendaner House 760 Samuels	c. 1885	Standing — offices
Garvey-Viehl-Kelley House 769 Samuels	1884–85, enlarged 1890s	Standing — landmarked; apartment clubhouse
“Building A” east side	before 1886	Gone — now Arnold Park
1013 Poindexter Street four blocks north	1918	Standing — brought back in 2021

Three of the five nineteenth-century buildings are still there. Every one of them survived for the same reason: somebody found it a use. A tasting room. An office. A clubhouse for the apartments built around it.

The two that didn't are a memory and a playground.

That's the whole argument for old houses, and it isn't sentimental. A building that nobody needs comes down. A building somebody needs gets a new roof.

Read No. 01 — 1013 Poindexter 817-360-5555

Where This Came From

Sources

The mapLibrary of Congress — Fort Worth, Tex., “The Queen of the Prairies,” 1886, H. Wellge. Public domain, no known restrictions.
The neighborhoodHometown by Handlebar (Richard Selcer) — Samuels Avenue, Parts 1–3, and The Need for Speed.
769 SamuelsArchitecture in Fort Worth — Garvey-Viehl-Kelley House.
731 SamuelsCultureMap Fort Worth · PaperCity · CandysDirt.
StreetcarsFort Worth Magazine — When Streetcars Roamed Fort Worth.
Still chasingThe Texas Historical Commission marker file for 769 Samuels; Fort Worth city directories 1885–1890; the Daily Gazette for June 1885 and November 1883.