Quality Hill & the Cattle Barons' Mansions

When cattle and, later, oil turned Fort Worth fortunes into fortunes, the people who made them built their houses along the bluff above the Clear Fork of the Trinity. The neighborhood earned the nickname 'Quality Hill,' and its streets filled with the Victorian and Prairie-style mansions of bankers, ranchers, lawyers, and publishers, each grander than the last. This walk strings together the surviving great houses — the Eddleman-McFarland and Pollock-Capps homes on the original bluff, and the trio of South Side landmarks led by Thistle Hill, the Georgian Revival mansion a Waggoner heiress named for herself — and ends at the Woman's Club, where the city's leading women turned a cluster of fine old homes to civic use. Read the architecture as a ledger of where the money came from: the elaborate woodwork inside, the marble and copper outside, the ballrooms above the garages. This is Fort Worth at its most flush.