Fort Worth Stockyards Museum determined to hold its place in history amid redevelopment

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If you didn’t notice the descriptive signs, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into an antique store.

A 115-year old light bulb, still burning. A yellowed gown dubbed the “Bad Luck Wedding Dress.” Vintage guns and tintype photos.

All of the objects are part of the collection at the Fort Worth Stockyards Museum .

If you ask the museum’s director, Teresa Burleson, for a tour, she’ll tell you all kinds of stories about the colorful history of the Stockyards and “Hell’s Half Acre” — the heyday of outlaws and saloons, a golden age as a world livestock capital, and the “Wall Street of the West.”

The museum’s building itself is historic. In the prime of the Stockyards, it held the commission offices that bought and sold livestock, as well as three banks, a telegraph office and cafeteria.

Created by Charlie and Sue McCafferty, the founders of the North Fort Worth Historical Society, the museum has been a temple to Fort Worth history since 1989.

Charlie McCafferty’s father worked as the weighmaster at the Stockyards’ scale house.

Burleson said many people donate things found in the homes of relatives, like McCafferty’s father who worked in and around the Stockyards.

“What I hear most commonly is people say, ‘Our kids don’t care anything about history,’” Burleson said. “They didn’t want these things to get thrown away.”

Among Burleson’s favorite artifacts in the museum is an aerial photograph of the Stockyards, taken in December 1949 by Skeet Richardson.

The photo is Burleson’s favorite because it shows the Stockyards in its heyday, with over 2,600 livestock pens.

A majority of those livestock pens are no longer standing. A few have been preserved, along with the history of former horse and mule barns that were transformed into Mule Alley’s shops and restaurants.

Off to one side of the museum are more of Burleson’s favorites: a display of items from the Swift & Armor meat packing plants, including packaging, clothing and group photos of employees.

Working for the plants wasn’t just a job, Burleson said. It was a community; employees had their own choirs and baseball teams, boxing clubs, social clubs and beauty pageants..

The plants tried to use every part of the animal. Skins and horns were used to make furniture, and fat to make tallow and grease.

“Back in the day, if you went to school in this area, you would go on a field trip to the Stockyards and they would take you through the packing plant so kids knew where their meat came from,” Burleson said.

The museum is chock full of stories of Fort Worth’s notable cowboys and outlaws. Burleson pointed out a famed photograph of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the rest of the Wild Bunch.

The photo was taken shortly after the gang robbed a train in Nevada and came to Fort Worth to gamble. It was later turned over to the Pinkerton agents to assist in their search for the gang.

Perhaps the most famous object in the museum’s collection is a light bulb that has never burned out for 115 years.

The bulb originally was inside the Palace Theater in downtown. Now it gets its own birthday party every September at the museum.

Another popular attraction is the wedding dress, made in 1886, that has “brought personal misery or disaster to everyone who has worn it or planned to wear it,” the museum says.

Soon, work will begin on the next chapter of the Stockyards — a nearly $1 billion expansion and redevelopment on mostly vacant land behind the museum and Billy Bob’s Texas. The Livestock Exchange building, where the museum is located, is not part of the redevelopment plans, according to officials with the Stockyards Heritage Development Co., the firm at the helm of the plans.

Burleson is on a mission to make sure the little museum (and the Stockyards along with it) retains a stake in Fort Worth history.

“Our mission, as the North Fort Worth Historical Society, is to promote, preserve and perpetuate the history of the Stockyards in North Fort Worth, and that will always be our stance,” Burleson said. “We want to keep it real.”