Oakwood Cemetery: Cowtown Founders

A city's biography can be read on its gravestones, and few tell the story better than Oakwood. John Peter Smith — schoolteacher, surveyor, banker, and the mayor who gave Fort Worth its schools and water system — founded this hilltop burying ground in 1879 and now rests in the very acres he donated. Around him lie the men and women who turned a frontier army post into 'Panther City': Confederate veterans who came home to build banks and railroads, the Van Zandts and the Smiths whose names still mark streets and hospitals, and the pioneers of Pioneer's Rest, the older graveyard begun in 1850 over the children of the fort's own commander. This walk threads Oakwood and the nearby founding cemeteries — including two Jewish congregations' burial grounds — to trace, in stone, the people who made Fort Worth. Walk quietly, mind the older sections, and read the names.