North Richland Hills, Texas

Everything North Richland Hills is known for

1 song mention this city 2 artists from here

Music in North Richland Hills

Songs About North Richland Hills

North Richland Hills
Rothbard Cottingham Bandwagon
81%
"TITLE"

Artists From North Richland Hills

G
Gary Morris
country
L
Logan Henderson
pop

Rivers & Roads in Song near North Richland Hills

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near North Richland Hills.

Texas State Highway 199 8 songs Interstate 20 13 songs Trinity River 11 songs Interstate 45 8 songs Interstate 35 43 songs Chisholm Trail 8 songs

History of North Richland Hills

The Day Evel Knievel Jumped Eleven Mack Trucks Here RoadyGoat

Where there are now houses and an elementary school, there used to be one of the loudest places in North Texas. Green Valley Raceway opened in 1960 on Bill McClure's old dairy farm in Smithfield, a combined road course and drag strip that drew 125,000 spectators in its first full season and hosted NHRA, AHRA, and Trans-Am racing. Its single most famous day came on February 17, 1974, when daredevil Evel Knievel roared up a ramp and cleared eleven parked Mack trucks while broadcaster Howard Cosell and former Cowboy Don Meredith called it for ABC's Wide World of Sports in front of a crowd around 30,000. Knievel made the jump cleanly, then paid for the rough landing the next day in a hospital bed, telling a local reporter he'd felt his back go on impact. Months later, in September 1974, he attempted his ill-fated Snake River Canyon leap. Green Valley Raceway ran until 1986, then was demolished. Today Green Valley Elementary sits on part of the ground where the engines once screamed. (Source: WFAA; Green Valley Raceway history.)

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The Dairy Farm That Became a City of Seventy Thousand RoadyGoat

The streets and strip centers around you sit on what was, within living memory, open dairy pasture. This corner of northeastern Tarrant County traces back to the Peters Colony, where empresario W.S. Peters agreed to bring some 600 families into the region, and settlers began arriving in the summer of 1848. For more than a hundred years it stayed farm and ranch country. Then in 1952 a man named Clarence Jones subdivided his 268-acre dairy farm into home lots, and rather than annex to the neighboring development of Richland Hills to the south, the roughly 500 residents chose to stand up their own town. They borrowed the name of that successful neighbor and added a direction, becoming North Richland Hills, incorporated by election in 1953. From there the growth was explosive: about 8,600 people by 1960, more than 16,000 by 1970, over 45,000 by 1990. Today it is the fourth-largest city in Tarrant County, with more than 70,000 residents on ground that one farmer once milked cows. (Source: Handbook of Texas; City of North Richland Hills.)

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Zion, the Railroad, and the Birth of Smithfield RoadyGoat

The Smithfield part of North Richland Hills started life under a different name: Zion, a small farming settlement here before 1870. The thing that made it a town was iron. When the St. Louis and Southwestern Railway, the Cotton Belt, laid track through the area in 1887, the new depot rose about a quarter mile south of Zion, and the community shifted to meet it. The settlement was renamed Smithfield for Eli Smith, who had earlier donated land here for a church and cemetery. As a shipping point for area farms and ranches, Smithfield grew steadily even after a bad fire in 1890; by 1900 it counted 137 people and a school with three teachers and 156 students. Wartime jobs in nearby Fort Worth pushed it to about 350 residents by the late 1940s. After a bitterly fought campaign, North Richland Hills annexed Smithfield in 1958. The old railroad town's name lives on in a cemetery, a Masonic lodge, and the TEXRail commuter station that still stops where the Cotton Belt once ran. (Source: Handbook of Texas.)

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Judge Benjamin Franklin Barkley

1855

(1822 - 1882) In 1855 Benjamin F. Barkley, a Kentucky physician, with his wife Malinda Elizabeth Duncan (1827-1917) and their children settled on a farm at Birdville. There he practiced medicine, became a lawyer, and a charter member of Masonic Lodge No. 148 in Fort Worth. In 1856 Dr. Barkley tried unsuccessfully to keep the county seat at Birdville. As a Republican leader, he spoke out against slavery and secession. Barkley was admired for donating land for Birdville's cemetery and participating in Indian campaigns, but his strong will and pro-Union stand stirred anger in the area. He barely escaped death several times. Barkley treated wounded Confederate soldiers and aided their families despite his opposition to the Civil War, and served as local postmaster during the war. During Reconstruction, Barkley headed the county registration board which denied the vote to former Confederate supporters. He was appointed county judge in 1867 and used federal troops to maintain order. With great courage he fought to protect the rights of the ex-slaves. He left office after Democrats won all county offices in 1873, but remained active in law and medicine throughout North Texas for the remainder of his life. (1979)

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Hadley, Erma Jean Chansler Johnson

1968

Erma Jean Chansler Johnson Hadley, born on October 6, 1942, in Leggett, Texas, daughter of Leondus "Leon" H. and Thelma (Davis) Chansler, was the first African American from Leggett to graduate from college. She was also the first woman and first African American to lead Tarrant County College (TCC, known until 1999 as Tarrant County Junior College). She graduated from Dunbar High School in Livingston in 1959 and received her bachelor's degree in business education from Prairie View A&M University. Although her courses were intended for teachers, and although she received a teaching certificate, Erma Chansler studied business education because she wanted to become a secretary. Upon graduating, she began working for an income tax accountant. She soon discovered that being a secretary was not her true passion, so she went on to teach business education at the all-Black Turner High School in Carthage, Texas. She earned her master's degree in business education from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She also took graduate courses in business education at the University of Texas at Austin and post-graduate studies in higher education administration at the University of North Texas. On December 27, 1971, Erma Chansler married Lawrence Eugene Johnson, with whom she had one daughter, T. Ardenia. Following her husband's death in 1996, she married Bill J. Hadley. In 1968 she began teaching business at Tarrant County Junior College's Northeast Campus in Hurst in its inaugural semester. Across her decades-long career with TCC, she held numerous administrative positions, including director of personnel, vice chancellor for human resources, and vice chancellor for administrative and community services before being appointed interim chancellor in 2009 and then chancellor in 2010. She established several organizations and initiatives for college employees, such as Leadership TCC; the TCC Institute; and the TCC Employee Scholarship Program, which provided stipends to TCC staff taking TCC classes. She also established the district's call center; the District Fulfillment Center, which handled bulk mailing; and the TCC campus copy centers. Erma Hadley markedly improved diversity in both the student body and the staff at TCC following her appointment as chancellor. Enrollment also grew considerably under her leadership. She belonged to several community-focused organizations. She was appointed to the Trinity River Authority of Texas by Governor Bill Clements and to the Texas Governor's Committee of Volunteerism by Governor George W. Bush. She was a member of the North Texas Commission, the Tarrant County Hospital District board of directors, the Rotary Club of Fort Worth, the Texas A&M Research Foundation board of directors, and the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine advisory council. She chaired the JPS Health Network; the United Way Marketing Committee; and the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport board of directors, where she was the first woman and first African American to be appointed chair of the board-a noteworthy accomplishment for a woman during a time when White men controlled many of these businesses and organizations. She ran for Fort Worth city council in 1997 but lost. Her many awards and honors included an honorary doctorate in education from Paul Quinn College in Dallas and induction into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame in 2010. She was an active member of the Mount Rose Baptist Church in Fort Worth. Erma Johnson Hadley died of pancreatic cancer on October 1, 2015, at the age of seventy-two.

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Parker Cemetery

1836

Land for cemetery donated by Isaac Duke Parker, Jan. 14, 1901. He was son of Isaac Parker, pioneer politician for whom Parker County was named and who was the uncle of Cynthia Ann Parker, white girl captured by Comanche Indians in 1836 and reared as an Indian. She was the wife of Comanche Peta Nocona and mother of Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche war chief. Both Isaac Parker and Isaac Duke Parker served as members of the Texas Legislature. Isaac Duke Parker is buried here. Cemetery also contains a public burial section.

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Birdville, Site of Tarrany County's First Courthouse

1849

First (1849-1856) county seat, Tarrant County, with 80 acres for public use. Courthouse foundation was laid on site donated by G. Akers and W. Norris. After courts upheld--in Walker vs. Tarrant County--vote in bitterly contested 1856 election, Fort Worth became the county seat. (1968).

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Hurst, TX

1870

Hurst, just to the north of Fort Worth, is on State Highways 121 and 10, north of the West Fork of the Trinity River in the northeastern quadrant of Tarrant County. By the middle or late 1840s farmers were beginning to settle within what are now the confines of Hurst. Isaac Parker's log cabin, purchased in 1853, lay just outside what is now the southwestern corner of Hurst, and the Parker family cemetery is now within the city limits. Important among the settlers who moved there after the Civil War were Tennessee families, especially that of William L. Hurst, and Indiana families, including those of Daniel Arwine and Jeff Souder. The Indiana clans established a church and school at the site in the late 1870s and thereafter the community always supported at least one church and one school. The Arwine farming and ranching community grew slowly until the Rock Island line was built through in 1903. William Hurst donated land in exchange for the establishment of a depot named for him. The Rock Island at first labeled the site Hurst, but there was already a Hurst in Coryell County that had a post office. So the budding Tarrant County community was soon named Ormel; it had a post office from 1904 to 1909. The community was renamed Hurst in 1909. The depot and its stationmasters and telegraphers operated for some thirty years. Yet there were probably no more than twenty people in downtown Hurst between 1910 and 1920, and the area's agricultural products-cotton, grain, and cattle-were not enough to make the train stop regularly. Sand and gravel excavations began south of Hurst in the Trinity riverbottoms early in the 1900s; larger round-the-clock operations began in the 1920s. Illegal whiskey was brewed along the wooded river too, selling for about $10 a gallon during prohibition , 1919-1933. After 1903 there was at least one general store in the community, and during the 1930s and 1940s a handful of grocery stores, filling stations, and cafes opened. The Work Projects Administration erected a brick school in 1940, and the population of Hurst numbered perhaps 100. By the 1940s Hurst was becoming a bedroom community for Fort Worth. Its post office was revived in 1949. Old State Highway 183 (now State Highway 10) was paved with concrete in 1950, and in 1951 Bell Aircraft (Helicopter) announced it would build a plant in Hurst. To prevent Fort Worth from annexing it and to help secure a water supply, Hurst in 1951 voted, 36 to 24, to incorporate. A shopping center and apartments were being built before that year was out. A chamber of commerce organized at Hurst in 1952 and merged with the Euless chamber in 1955; the Bedford chamber joined in 1969. The Hurst and Euless school districts merged in 1955, joined by Bedford in 1958. It was estimated in 1958 that of the 8,500 people living in Hurst, 50 percent worked in Dallas and 40 percent in Fort Worth. Blocked from growing to the south by Fort Worth, Hurst from 1956 to 1958 overzealously pursued annexations in other directions; this triggered intercity tensions and defensive reactions by other "mid-cities" communities. The northeast campus of Tarrant County Junior College (now Tarrant County College ) opened in Hurst in 1968, prompting more growth and jobs. During the height of the Vietnam War, the Bell Helicopter workforce topped 11,000, many of them building Hueys. Hurst, Euless, and Bedford formed a hospital district in 1969. By 1970 the population of Hurst was more than 27,200. The North East Mall arrived in 1972, doubling retail sales in Hurst in a month, and in the early 1990s it remained the largest mall in Tarrant County. The construction of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and its January 1974 opening further stimulated the local economy, but in the 1970s the town had almost reached the limits of possible expansion, and its population growth inevitably slowed. Many of the newcomers were professionals and members of the Republican party , which changed the character of the

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North Richland Hills, TX

1950

North Richland Hills is on State highways 26, 183, and 820, eight miles west of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and eight miles northeast of downtown Fort Worth in northeastern Tarrant County. The town is part of the Fort Worth-Arlington Metropolitan Statistical Area . The area was agricultural until 1950, when Clarence Jones developed his farm into a residential area and named it North Richland Hills, in imitation of an adjacent successful development to the south. The city was incorporated by election on April 25, 1953. During the 1980s North Richland Hills had a broad business base, manufacturing everything from computers (Tandy Advanced Products) to mattresses (Ohio Sealy). Other businesses included Walker Construction Company, Sanger Harris (Foley's retail), Graham Magnetics (magnetic tape), Bates Containers, Allied Northeast Bank, Interfirst Bank, and the Bank of North Texas. The Mid-Cities Daily News and the North Hills News were the local papers. In 1990 the Birdville Independent School District had six elementary schools, one junior high, and one senior high in North Richland Hills. In addition, there were several denominational schools, and twenty-two churches representing ten faiths. The city boundary ran through the northeast campus of Tarrant County Junior College. A municipal complex built in 1960 and expanded in 1987 housed the police department, the water department, and the city administration. A second civic center of 87,000 square feet housed the city library and the Parks and Recreation Department; the theater in the building was home to the North East Fine Arts League. In 1958 North Richland Hills had an estimated population of 7,000. Its population increased steadily, until by 1970 it was estimated at 15,735. In 1978 the population was 23,265, and by 1990 it had risen to 38,959. In the early 1990s North Richland Hills had a council-manager form of city government . By 2000 the population reached 55,635.

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Things to Do in North Richland Hills

quirky 20.4 mi away
Chewbacca's Grave — May the 4th

May the 4th be with you — and with the Wookiee. Peter Mayhew the seven-foot-three British actor who brought Chewbacca to life in every Star Wars film from 1977…
historical 24.7 mi away
The Sixth Floor Museum

Where Lee Harvey Oswald fired from. The JFK assassination site at Dealey Plaza.
historical 24.7 mi away
Dealey Plaza

On November 22 1963 President John F Kennedy rode through Dealey Plaza in an open Lincoln convertible and was shot from the sixth floor window of the Texas…
historical 7.5 mi away
Fort Worth Stockyards

Daily cattle drives down the street. Honky-tonks and rodeos in the old West.
historical 7.5 mi away
Billy Bob's Texas

Billy Bob's opened in 1981 in an old cattle barn in the Fort Worth Stockyards and at one hundred twenty-seven thousand square feet it is the largest honky-tonk…
food 7.7 mi away
Joe T. Garcia's

Joe T opened his little family restaurant behind the packing plant in the Fort Worth Stockyards in 1935. There was no menu. His wife Jessie served whatever she…
historical 18.9 mi away
WWII Marine Glider Base at Eagle Mountain

In 1942 the United States Marines bought 2931 acres of ranchland on Eagle Mountain Lake for a purpose that sounds almost unbelievable now — training pilots to…
quirky 18.9 mi away
The Azle Earthquake Swarm

Starting in November 2013 the ground beneath Azle started shaking and it did not stop for 84 days. Twenty-seven earthquakes rattled windows cracked foundations…

Sports in North Richland Hills

⭐ HOMETOWN LEGENDS Class 5A · Football

Richland Royals — Richland — a college & pro athletic pipeline

4 alumni who reached major-college or pro sports

North Richland Hills is certainly a community that rallies behind its own, and Richland High School has seen its share of talented athletes go on to compete at higher levels. The tradition of athletic excellence at Richland has paved the way for several former Rebels to achieve professional careers. It's always a point of pride for the community to see these athletes represent their hometown.

Among the notable alumni who have continued their athletic journeys are Kelly Blackwell, a former NFL player, and Trent Grisham, a professional baseball player in Major League Baseball (MLB) who currently plays for the New York Yankees. The football field has also seen DaShaun White, a professional football player in the National Football League currently with the San Francisco 49ers, and Rashee Rice, a professional football player in the National Football League currently with the Kansas City Chiefs.

Pro/D1 alumni
4
Class
5A
Founded
1961
Key Players
  • Kelly Blackwell — (Class of 1987), former NFL player
  • Trent Grisham — (Class of 2015), professional baseball player in Major League Baseball (MLB) and currently
  • DaShaun White — (Class of 2018), professional football player in the National Football League and currentl
  • Rashee Rice — (Class of 2019), professional football player in the National Football League and currentl
The moment

Trent Grisham is a professional baseball player in Major League Baseball (MLB) and currently plays for the New York Yankees.

Sources: Wikipedia · SI High School (ScoreBook Live)

Everything Near North Richland Hills

1473 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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