The Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame owes its design to the world-renowned architect David M. Schwarz.
I may have been the first working journalist outside Hereford, Texas, to publish a word or three on the National Cowgirl Museum & Hall of Fame.
It’s not a contest, of course. Nobody’s keeping score. Scarcely matters as to who got there earliest on that front, but my longtime station as city editor of the Amarillo Daily News & Globe-Times makes it likely that my initial daily-paper and Associated Press reports during the middle 1970s served to tell the rest of the world that something monumental was happening in that remote cattle-raising town in Deaf Smith County. The modest beginnings carried large implications.
Hollywood cowboy Gene Autry, a champion ticket-seller of the last century, was developing his own signature museum in Los Angeles during this period. Autry visited my newsroom office during the 1970s to consult with the paper’s film critic and Western-art historian, George E. Turner, and me about his ambition to make that showplace into a half-and-half combination of frontier history and Western pop-cultural mythology.
George and I had been the first published cowboy-movie researchers to place Autry’s eventual major-league credentials in context with his modest beginnings in the movie racket, pinpointing his instant transformation from a chump-change, bit-parts actor (in 1934s “Mystery Mountain”) to the star player of 1935s “The Phantom Empire” (an indescribably strange science-fiction/cowboy/musical adventure). Autry had the museum-making advantage of a fortune in movie-and-television royalties, and he had chosen his location as L.A.’s Griffith Park. The site lay within shouting distance of the futuristic Griffith Park Observatory, which Autry remembered fondly as a shooting location for “The Phantom Empire.”
So, George Turner, Gene Autry, and I toured the Cowgirl Museum’s location in nearby Hereford, and Autry came away impressed with its small-scale authenticity: “This place has the makings of something big,” said Autry, who remained a small-town Texan at heart. “Y’know, cowgirls have contributed as much as us cowboys to the heritage, and Hollywood had its singing cowgirls, like Dorothy Page and Dale Evans, around the same time as me an’ Roy Rogers. It’s the balance of nature.” (Autry’s Western Heritage Center would open in 1988.)
That was then, of course, and this is now — and the Cowgirl Museum has long since left Hereford for a greater prominence and a broader practical influence: The immediate linchpin is the Cowgirl Museum’s permanent landmark, a 33,000-square-foot interactive shrine within Fort Worth’s Cultural District.
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The museum contains over 5,000 items in its artifacts collection.
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True to its original mission, the Cowgirl has cinched itself as the planet’s most emphatic recognition of the women who helped to win the West, past and present, with gumption, graceful resilience, and independence of spirit. The shaping of the Western frontier as an outpost of civilization, of course, would alter the globe itself. Additional such pioneers and pacesetters are honored with each fresh year.
Each of the hundreds of honorees in the Hall of Fame — including physicians, businesswomen, artists, writers, ranchers, and even the late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — looked at social and economic obstacles as challenges in need of being lassoed and brought to bay. The common thread is that of lives well pursued in the frontier (literally and figuratively speaking), experienced at close range and usually on horseback.
The Cowgirl Museum traces its origins to 1975 and a cramped basement of the Municipal Library in Hereford, seat of Deaf Smith County in the Panhandle. The originator was Margaret Clark Formby (1929–2003), wife of the radio broadcaster Clint Formby. Margaret Formby courted a larger city to take charge of the cornerstone exhibits, and Fort Worth proved the right place. A temporary 1990s headquarters in downtown Fort Worth — once an offshoot of the historic Woolworth Building — held the museum until the completion of its Cultural District shrine in Fort Worth in 2002.
The Hall of Fame is central, showcasing photographs, artifacts, and biographical information on Cowgirl honorees. The rotunda bespeaks grandeur with its dozen Corinthian columns, but a down-home atmosphere prevails. Attractions have included a short film, “Kinship with the Land”; the Connie Reeves Discovery Corral, a play area for children; and displays covering the rodeo circuit, cowgirls in popular culture from music to movies and comic books; and an earphone jukebox whose selections include the famous recording of “My Adobe Hacienda,” by Louise Massey & Her Westerners.
A young Sandra Day O’Connor.
Beyond cutting, trick riding, and bull-straddling, the cowgirls have emerged over the long term as role models for women and men alike. The jazz singer-turned-Hollywood cowgirl hero Dale Evans (a 1995 Hall of Famer) once expressed the interest in these terms: “Cowgirl is an attitude, really. A pioneer spirit, a special American brand of courage. The cowgirl faces life head-on, lives by her own lights, and makes no excuses. Cowgirls take stands, they speak up. They defend things they hold dear.”
Founder Margaret Formby, daughter of a rancher, had built the original Cowgirl Museum from a personal collection dating from before her time, all the way back to the mid-1800s — photographs and artifacts of ranchland pioneers, artists, writers, tribal leaders, and rodeo contenders. Mrs. Formby wanted to share her collection with the world. Hence the starting point at Hereford, and hence the expansion to Fort Worth. (Hereford still boasts such signature attractions as a Municipal Museum and a prominent billboard touting a company called Deaf Smith County Hearing Aids.)
After considering proposals from 35 cities in six states, Mrs. Formby entrusted her collection to Fort Worth — itself a nexus of the Western way of life. The kinship of Fort Worth to the Texas Panhandle, after all, is as close as Col. Charles Goodnight was to the tribal leader Quanah Parker.
Once it had been situated in Fort Worth, the Cowgirl Museum raised the wherewithal to develop the landmark structure, designed by architect David M. Schwarz. The location is 1720 Gendy St. in the Cultural District, adjacent to the Fort Worth Museum of Science & History.
