Fort Worth, Texas map

Fort Worth is the point where the Blackland Prairie gives way to the Cross Timbers and the Interior Lowlands: historically "where the West begins." It sits at the junction of I-20, I-30 and I-35W, with the city limits now reaching north past Alliance Airport into Denton County and west into Parker County.

Arlington, home to AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field, lies between Fort Worth and Dallas. Other Tarrant County cities include Grand Prairie (shared with Dallas County), Mansfield, Keller, Southlake and North Richland Hills.

Tarrant County counted 2,110,640 residents in 2020, third in the state, packed into 904 square miles — the smallest area of any of the big Texas urban counties. It was created in 1849, the same year as the fort, and named for Edward H. Tarrant. Its neighbors are Denton to the north, Dallas to the east, Ellis to the southeast, Johnson to the south, Parker to the west and Wise to the northwest.

Two branches of the Trinity River meet inside the city. The West Fork arrives from the northwest through Eagle Mountain Lake and Lake Worth; the Clear Fork comes up from Benbrook Lake in the southwest, past TCU and the Cultural District. They join just north of downtown, below the bluff where the 1849 army post stood, and the combined river runs east toward Dallas. Flood-control levees and the Trinity Trails follow both forks through the middle of town, so the river shows on the map as a green corridor rather than a waterfront.

The Chisholm Trail crossed the West Fork here in the 1860s and 1870s, and when the Texas & Pacific Railway finally reached town in 1876 the herds no longer had to walk to Kansas — they were loaded onto trains in Fort Worth instead. The Union Stock Yards opened north of the river, and the Armour and Swift packing plants that followed in 1902 made the city a meatpacking center for the next half century. The Livestock Exchange Building, the pens and Exchange Avenue survive as the Stockyards National Historic District, where a longhorn herd is walked down the street twice a day. The Chisholm Trail Parkway, the toll road that runs southwest from downtown to Cleburne in Johnson County, is named for the route.

About three miles west of downtown, the Cultural District puts four museums within walking distance of each other: the Kimbell Art Museum in Louis Kahn's vaulted 1972 building, with a later pavilion by Renzo Piano across the lawn; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by Tadao Ando over a reflecting pond; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, built around a collection of Remington and Russell paintings; and the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. The Will Rogers Memorial Center next door hosts the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo each January, with Dickies Arena on the same grounds.

Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base takes up the west side of the city beside Lake Worth. It was Carswell Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command bomber field, until the Navy took over the flying mission in 1994 and the reserve squadrons moved in. Its runway is shared with Air Force Plant 4, the government-owned factory Lockheed Martin runs there, which built F-16s and now builds the F-35.

The city also sits on top of the Barnett Shale, and the horizontal drilling boom of the 2000s put producing natural gas wells inside the city limits — beside schools, office parks and the airports. Drilling has slowed since, but the well pads and their pipeline easements are still visible features on the street map.

Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, opened in 1974, straddles the Tarrant–Dallas county line about 20 miles northeast of downtown; it covers more ground than the island of Manhattan and has its own ZIP code and police department. Fort Worth's own fields are Meacham International, just north of downtown on the way to the Stockyards, and Fort Worth Alliance in the far north of the city.