GOD & TEXAS: Rowdy Towns

They Raise Merry Cain at the Waco Tap! This was a headline in the Fort Worth Democrat newspaper on April 10, 1878. The accompanying article referred to a popular saloon in the red light district of Hells Half Acre. 

In the 1870s, many Texas towns attracted cowboys, railroad workers, and buffalo hunters with prostitution, gambling, dance halls, and seedy hotels. Austin had Guy Town, and Dallas had Frogtown and Boggy Bayou. Houston had Happy Hollow, and in San Antonio, it was called the Sporting District. 

But the cost of these pleasures was morally ruinous. Crime, violence, and racial discrimination were commonplace. The women who worked as prostitutes often suffered from venereal disease, suicide, human trafficking, and rampant drug use. Because many city officials were compromised with bribes, these bordellos seldom had adversaries.

Hell’s Half Acre in Fort Worth was the most prominent of these sordid settlements. Newspapers reported that from the 1870s and into the 20th Century, such Old West luminaries as Wyatt Earp, Sam Bass, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid visited. The income that was generated from tourists induced civic leaders to nurture vice, rather than end it. 

Eventually, decent people cried for change. Two unlikely women who led the charge to clean out the bawdy houses were Delia Krum Collins and Kate Belle Murray Burchill. Together, they set in motion an appeal for morality and respectability.

Collins was a widow with two sons. After years of frail health, she experienced a miraculous healing under the ministry of Carrie Judd Montgomery in Buffalo NY. Collins moved to Fort Worth in 1888 and was outraged to find such open corruption. 

Burchill arrived in Fort Worth with her family in 1874. Finding no schools, she started one that eventually became the first free public school in Fort Worth. Burchill would later become the city’s second female postmaster, hiring the first African Americans to deliver the mail.

Like Collins, Burchill saw that this depraved society had abandoned many orphans, known as bootblacks. Together, these noble women established an orphanage and other outreaches to street people that included Sunday schools and Gospel tent meetings. Founding the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Burchill and Collins rescued many desperate women from the prostitution industry. 

With the help of other concerned citizens, Hell’s Half Acre finally shut down. But it took people like Collins and Burchill to confront perversion and wrestle against evil. It was the English preacher Charles Frederic Aked who said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing!” 

For those good people who close their eyes to the moral corruption of our times, please consider Proverbs 24:11-12 NLT, “Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to die; save them as they stagger to their death. Don’t excuse yourself by saying, ‘Look, we didn’t know.’ For God understands all hearts, and He sees you. He who guards your soul knows you knew. He will repay all people as their actions deserve.”

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