The Man Who Bricked Exchange Avenue written by Frank Burkett My Aunt Grace Burkett and my Father Fred wrote a family history for which we are grateful. I have condensed some of it here: Aunt Grace was born in 1895 and was nine years older than her brother Fred, and she mother-henned the whole family and never married. Their father (my grandfather), James Madison Burkett, was born in 1851. Before his marriage at age 30, Jim was pretty much a rover, freighting from Missouri to Texas before the railroads came. He would buy big fine mules, fancy harnesses, a new wagon, load it with apples and other produce and drive the outfit to San Antonio and other Texas cities. He would have no trouble getting twice what he paid for it. He would then give $15. for a Mexican pony and ride back to Missouri, again doubling his money on the horse. He ran into lots of wagon trains and outlaws this way. In the 1870s he hauled supplies to Indian forts at Fort Griffin and Fort Belknap and even Comanche Indians to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. In 1851, he was a partner in a grocery store in Turnersville, went back to Arkansas long enough to get married, then farmed and ranched for the next 10 years. In 1892, the growing family moved to a ranch between Canyon and Amarillo where my father Fred was born in 94. But pickings were slim on the prairie, so the Burketts moved to Ft. Worth in 1898. The family settled on a farm just north of the old Charbonneau place, two miles east of Lake Worth. The children commuted to Ft. Worth schools via buggy and horseback. Jim always had considerable cattle stock, so when the packing houses and stockyards started construction about 1905, he built a nice home at 2308 Market Street on the North Side (see picture). Jim, who died in 1928, was quite an operator in his younger years, in spite of having to raise four daughters and three sons with his wife, Jennie Elizabeth. He was a cattleman and sometimes contractor. He had several mule teams and started contracting on dirt work. Before long he had a considerable outfit going, with as many as 100 men and gangs of men loading dirt with shovels on to slat dump wagons. He paved Exchange with Thurber bricks from Main Street to the packing plants, about a half mile long and fifty feet wide. The six inch concrete base was all mixed by hand. The Burketts were friends with all the better pioneer families on the North Side. Aunt Grace bought a house at 1615 Grand Avenue on the bluff overlooking Rockwood Park sometime around 1915; she taught school all of her life, retiring in 1951 as dean of girls at Paschal, and she and Aunt Vera lived there until Graces death in 1973. The Burketts came here in 1898, so were almost pioneers. Copied from an article in Fort Worth...the way we were.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 16:10:14 +0000
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