6th Ave Homes Fort Worth, Texas

Fort Worth
House Stories

Every old house in this town has a paper trail — deeds, plats, assessors' cards, permits. Most of it sits in a county office and nobody reads it. We read it, and then we write down what it says.

1013 Poindexter Street — a blue one-storey Craftsman bungalow with a full-width covered porch.

No. 01  ·  For sale

1013 Poindexter

A house on the street that used to be Pearl

Built in 1918. Bought in 1927 for $4,750 by a man whose son, a Fort Worth police officer, sold the back twenty-five feet of the yard to the City in 1958 and died a year later. On the courthouse steps in 1964 for $2,350. Lost again in 2008. Brought back in 2021.

Told from the county's own paper — a 1911 plat with a spring drawn on it, an assessor's card typed in 1938, and the deeds in between.

Read the story
An 1886 engraved bird's-eye view of the North End of Fort Worth showing Samuels Avenue, a cemetery and a racing track.

Companion piece

Samuels Avenue, 1886

A man from Milwaukee drew this street. Most of it is gone.

Four nineteenth-century houses on one block, read off a bird's-eye view an artist sold door to door. Three are still standing. One is a playground now.

Also a record of the four times we identified a building wrong, and how we found out.

Read the companion

Why bother

Because a house nobody knows anything about is just square footage, and square footage is the least interesting thing about a place to live.

And because the record keeps surprising us. A spring drawn by hand on a 1911 plat. A police officer selling his back yard to the City for three hundred dollars, a year before he died. A house that sold for less in 1964 than it cost in 1927.

None of that is in the tax roll. All of it is in the file.

If you own an old Fort Worth house and want to know what's in its file — call. We'll go look.

817-360-5555