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HISTORY
The Park Hill neighborhood is located three miles southwest of the Fort Worth Central Business District overlooking the Fort Worth Zoo and parts of Forest Park. Its streets are circular, outlining the bluff above the Zoo. They all terminate on Park Hill Drive at the southern edge of the neighborhood.
It is included in two surveys.
Most of Park Hill lies within the 1864 S.A. & M.G. Railroad
Survey, owner of most of this land at the time, and the 1860
Gouhenant Survey. Much of the land in this survey was sold to
the City of Fort Worth in 1909-1910 to form Forest Park and the
City Zoo.
The Fairmount Land Company began
general development in 1926. W.C. Guthrie began developing Park
Hill in 1926 with building permits for $12,000 homes with at
least nine rooms and tile roofs. By 1928, fifty homes had been
built at a total cost of $1,250,000.
This addition soon became the
home of many prominent Fort Worth professionals, oilmen and city
leaders. The Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey
lists 22 homes in this area as historically significant and possible
candidates for historic markers. The neighborhood entrance gates,
street lights and tile street name insets in the curbs are also
mentioned as being historically significant.
Period street lights were added
to Park Hill in 1927, and were updated in their original form
by the City of Fort Worth in the early 1980's.
In 1915, Mrs. Ida Turner, a Fort
Worth artist and postmaster, convinced the Fairmount Land Company
to contribute two and one-half acres, later increased to six
acres, of Park Hill for the building of a children's hospital.
Located at 2400 Winton Terrace East, the land extended to University
Drive. Much of this land was used for raising cows, chickens
and fruit trees for children in the hospital.
The Federated Women's Club of
Fort Worth, in conjunction with the prestigious architectural
firm of Sanguinett & Statts, designers of Thistle Hill, and
various building trades, donated their services towards the construction
of the Fort Worth Free Baby Hospital.
Building was interrupted by World War I, but was finally completed in 1918. In 1923 a second story was added to accommodate children over five years of age. After the Fort Worth Children's Hospital was built on Pruitt, the Fort Worth Free Baby Hospital was abandoned and destroyed in the late 1950s. Newer ranch style homes now occupy this area on Winton Terrace West.
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