Cultural District & Camp Bowie

The wide, brick-paved boulevard you'll follow began life as an army road. In 1917 the U.S. Army carved Camp Bowie out of the undeveloped scrub west of downtown to train the 36th Division for the trenches of France, and 25,000 soldiers slept in Johnson grass where mansions and museums now stand. When the camp closed, the West Side filled in around its main artery — renamed Camp Bowie Boulevard and later paved in durable Thurber brick — and the empty parade grounds became Fort Worth's Cultural District, a cluster of world-class museums set among lawns and oak trees. This route runs the boulevard end to end, from the markers that recall the doughboys of the Great War to the Kimbell, the Amon Carter, the Modern, and the science, cowgirl, and cattle-raiser museums that draw visitors from across Texas today. It's a drive through a single square mile that holds both a vanished army camp and some of the finest art collections in the Southwest.