A printer-friendly brochure version of this recap is available (PDF, 1MB). The recap is arranged by era:
- Before 1911
- 1911 to 1920
- 1920 to 1940
- 1940 to 1960
- 1960 to 1980
Before 1911
Picture tall grass rippling in the wind, a coyote resting under thick brush and, far off, a red-tailed hawk circling on a rising current of warm air as it scans the ground for prey.
That is the landscape the first settlers found when they reached the Fredville area, and residents can still catch glimpses of it today.
Settlers were first drawn here by a Republic of Texas land-grant colony that investors opened in 1841. In the mid-1840s the Pennock family arrived, a husband and wife with a large brood of children. The mother's time in Texas was brief: she died within the year, and her grave is one of the area's earliest recorded burials. It lies in what is now Fairlight Cemetery, near the spot where the interstate and the state highway meet today.
Around the same time, an early settler of the Ashwell family arrived with his sons, bringing the area's first enslaved people. Among them was an enslaved man whose descendants still live in Fredville. The Ashwells settled just south of the river near today's Ashcombe Boulevard and Northeast 31st Street, where they set up a stagecoach stop, a general store and the area's first school. Their homestead survives as the Ashwell-Rook Home in Rook Park.
Two brothers of the Bauer family came south from Dallas in 1856, looking for more grazing land for their cattle and horses. They settled along Pecan Creek, where Bluestem Lake is today. Like the Ashwells, the Bauers opened a school on their property, and it served the community for about 40 years. The family's ancestral home still stands in Bauer Park.
In 1861 the town's founder, a man of the Kenning family, lived with his wife and children in Thrushton, a community later renamed Corbin City. Hearing that land in the county was available, he acquired about 300 acres of prairie that now make up downtown Fredville. Before he could build a house on it, he joined a Texas cavalry unit in 1862.
A survey of that original townsite, filed in January 1863, still exists.
By recording his title with the county that January, the founder laid the groundwork for what would become Fredville. In the end he never settled on the property; instead he offered the railroad a right-of-way through it. The financial panic of 1873 halted work on the line, but people kept moving to the little community of Kenning anyway. The community got a post office in 1874. In 1876 the founder filed a town plat that handed the railroad every other lot in exchange for building a depot in town.
Trains finally ran through Kenning to Fort Worth starting in 1876, and a few years later the railroad renamed the stop Fredville, the name the town has carried ever since.
Getting from the three-block town to Dallas took a full day on horseback.
Travel improved dramatically in July 1902 with the arrival of the interurban, an electric trolley line linking Dallas and Fort Worth. Cars ran hourly between 6 in the morning and 11 at night along one set of tracks, the fare was 2 cents a mile, and riding from one city to the other took about an hour and a half.
That same year the Fredville Independent School District was founded. Its first school bonds, sold in July 1905, raised $6,500, which paid for a two-story brick schoolhouse at 318 W. College St.
1911 to 1920
As the village grew, so did its problems. Houses packed close together created fire hazards, the town needed a public water system, and rules were needed to make residents keep their yards and outhouses clean. More and more residents came to believe the answer was incorporation.
Voters first took up the question in March 1910 and turned it down, 48 to 44.
Supporters put the question back on the ballot a year later. In March 1911, 96 of the town's roughly 900 residents voted, and incorporation passed 58 to 38.
The first city election came in late April, when 92 ballots were cast to choose the town's first mayor and five aldermen. The new council wasted no time, adopting Fredville's first 10 ordinances that June. These laws spelled out the government's duties, banned bringing anyone with a contagious disease into town, prohibited ball games in public streets and the firing of guns inside the town, and set rules for outhouses and public houses. They also set speed limits, outlawed selling alcohol to minors and set penalties for cruelty to animals.
Downtown grew quickly after incorporation. Businesses included two blacksmiths, a cotton gin, grocers and dry goods merchants, a lumberyard, a carriage maker, a hardware store, a drugstore, a hat shop, a barber, a laundry, a hotel, a post office and a lunch stand serving barbecue, meats and cold drinks. One resident laid a concrete walkway outside his house on Main Street, and the Commercial Club liked it so much that it formally commended him. Neighbors quickly followed his lead in a campaign to lay sidewalks and escape the ever-present mud.
The town went without an organized fire department until 1917. Volunteers with buckets handled most fires; in 1903 one such fire destroyed several shops along Main Street. Buckets were no match for a March 1910 fire that started in the train depot and leveled a whole business block. Another fire that September burned several businesses and pushed residents to demand public water, a system that won approval in 1911.
Through the 1910s and into the 1920s, city business centered on laying water lines and paving streets, bringing water to buildings and hard surfaces to dirt roads. In 1910 the town's longtime doctor, who delivered hundreds of babies over a long career, bought the first automobile in the county. Fredville High School graduated its first class in 1911, just a handful of students. Today FVISD graduates more than a thousand seniors every year.
Just to the west, Brindleworth Park was taking shape as a model town with modern comforts such as water, gas, sidewalks, telephones and paved streets. In 1912 the Brannock Brothers Broom Factory relocated from Dallas to Brindleworth Park, and Brindleworth Business College opened there too, in the building now known as the historic Alder-Quill Building. Another community soon grew up just south of the railroad tracks. Called South Brindleworth Park, it was home to the African American residents who worked for Brindleworth Park's businesses and households. Brindleworth Park remained a separate city until it joined Fredville in 1942.
Fredville's first water system went into service in 1918.
1920 to 1940
In 1920 the new fire department bought its first motorized fire engine, replacing the horse-drawn engines it had relied on until then. In 1923 voters elected the city's longest-serving mayor, a member of the Harlow family who would hold the office until 1949. That same year residents celebrated new mercury vapor lights on decorative poles along Main Street, making Fredville one of the first towns in the region with this kind of street lighting.
In August 1926 Fredville marked the completion of one of the largest paving programs ever undertaken by a city of its size, laying about 12,000 feet of solid concrete paving on Center Street and Main Street.
In 1929 a local druggist opened Corliss Drug Store at 118 W. Main St., selling sodas and ice cream from a fountain and medicine from the counter; a downtown café occupies the building today. East Fredville gained the Saffron Palace Supper Club in the late 1920s, a lavish nightspot that offered dining, dancing, music and shows.
Fredville's long aviation story began in 1929, when the Hartwell-Kane flying service opened near Brindleworth. Construction of Stony Creek Lake started in 1930 but was not finished until 1938.
In December 1931, in the depths of the Depression, the City Council set aside money for shoes, clothing, fruit, food and candy so the town's needy children would have presents to open on Christmas morning.
Fredville also had its brushes with Depression-era outlaws, who held up a downtown ticket office and, a few years later, robbed the town's bank.
1940 to 1960
World War II began in 1939, and its effects soon reached Fredville as Halbrook Field became a busy military training airfield. In the early 1940s the Westcott Aviation plant opened next to the base, one of the first fully enclosed aircraft plants in the region.
To house the thousands of workers who poured into town for jobs at Westcott, the government built Skyhaven Village at record speed. One house there went up in under two hours.
During the 1940s Fredville grew from about 900 residents to about 12,000. Much of the City Council's time went to annexing neighborhoods, extending water and sewer service and paving streets. Brindleworth Park gave up its own incorporation in 1942 and became part of Fredville. In 1944 construction started on a single-story city hall, the work of a local architect, which was completed in April 1945. Also in 1945, the city hired its first paid firefighter at $160 a month. When the longtime mayor retired in 1949, he had served 11 terms over two decades, a record no one has broken. Fredville's first fire station also opened in 1949, at 415 W. Main St., and the building still stands.
The Marquee Theater opened downtown in 1952 with about 900 seats. It welcomed audiences of every race from the start, years before other theaters followed. The Greyhaven Corporation started work in the mid-1950s on the Greyhaven Industrial Park, one of the region's largest planned industrial parks, about 3,500 acres.
Fire destroyed the Saffron Palace Supper Club in the early 1950s. The city's first library opened in 1954. In 1957 the tollway between Dallas and Fort Worth opened, speeding travel between the two cities but routing traffic around downtown Fredville. By 1959 Main Street was carrying several thousand fewer vehicles a day. Also in 1959, the Primrose Hill School District joined FVISD, bringing in about 500 students and roughly 20 square miles of territory.
By the late 1950s Fredville covered about 12 square miles, and roughly 60 more square miles had passed first reading for annexation but were on hold because there was no money for the needed infrastructure. When state lawmakers threatened to restrict annexation, the council moved fast and grew the city from about 15 to more than 50 square miles.
1960 to 1980
All that annexation brought growth. In 1962 Fredville set its all-time single-year record for construction, issuing nearly $9 million in building permits.
In 1966 the Brindleworth school system joined FVISD. In 1967 the city was recognized for its clean streets. South Fredville High School opened in 1969 with about 400 students; today it enrolls nearly 3,000.
By 1970 Fredville's population had reached about 45,000, matching neighboring Cedar Bluff.
City Hall got its first computer in 1972.
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