Founding Azle & the Walnut Creek Frontier

Out at the far northwest edge of Tarrant County, where Walnut Creek runs down toward the West Fork, the frontier lingered longer than it did closer to Fort Worth. This was raw, exposed country in the 1860s and 1870s, close enough to the edge of settlement that a Kiowa raid in 1867 left a lasting mark, and close-knit enough that one pioneer physician's gift of land in 1883 gave the town its name and its shape. This driving loop follows the founding of Azle: the creekside settlement and its early churches, the doctor — James Azle Steward — for whom the town and many of its institutions are named, and the school that carried his community's pioneer heritage forward. Some sites lie out among reservoirs and country roads now, but the story they tell is of how a scattering of frontier families on Walnut Creek became a town.