In the 1950s, history teacher Julia Kathryn Garrett of Fort Worth began collecting stories from old-timers and pioneers whose memory or knowledge reached back to the early days of the city. For fifteen summer vacations she worked from morning to night on her book, creating an anecdotal chronicle of the early years of the city that began as a fort on the Trinity River in 1849. She closed her history with events a quarter of a century later, when Fort Worth was poised on the edge of growth, ready to become a modern city with the 1876 arrival of the railroad.
First published in 1972 and reprinted by TCU Press in 1996.