Fort Worth Prairie Park
The Fort Worth Prairie Park is GPRC’s Flaghip Project
Preserving a 2,000 acre urban tallgrass prairie wilderness nearly three times the size of Central Park, just outside the backdoor of 5 million people. The “Fort Worth Prairie Park (FWPP) is a threatened 2,000 acre tract of native virgin prairie in southwest Tarrant County, and represents some of the last remaining original Fort Worth Prairie ecosystem.
2011 GOAL: Protect this multimillion dollar site from development and establish it as a first-class State Park that preserves sizable native Fort Worth Prairie tallgrass prairie, unique Prairie Barrens, American Indian, Anglo and Black heritage, wild and scenic Rock Creek and its roadless climax gallery forest, and the Benbrook Lake complex. The new State Park will be the latest advance in conservation, using work in wild nature as therapy for physical, psychological, and behavioral challenges. For several years, the Fort Worth Prairie Park has already served damaged youth through Ecological Health programming.
The new State Park will also serve as a special needs park for injured/traumatized/PTSD’d veterans coming off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Animals need refuge, people need refuge, and wild nature heals and strengthens both.
Critically sensitive native prairie protections on the Prairie Park 2,000 acres will be coupled with therapy/treatment centers downstream on the lakeshore, with on-foot social work & physical therapy sojourns upstream through the creek corridor into the tallgrass Prairie.
There will also be special horseback programs as balance training for vets with brain injuries on ecologically-designed trails in the Prairie, and other applied programming.
Conservation Status: The Texas General Land Office initially sought to sell this public land to developers. Has been protected from the bulldozers since 2006 by Great Plains Restoration Council, with the support of bi-partisan local and state elected officials, citizens across Texas, and from citizens and foundations around the country. Still has no permanent protection. Currently working with the GLO and Texas Parks and Wildlife to try to find a permanent protection solution. (The Fort Worth Prairie Park is mostly a preservation issue, vs. the Houston-area Coastal Prairie, which is a restoration issue.)
- 1.983 acres of original native Fort Worth Prairie in southwest Fort Worth, off Old Granbury Road (southeast of Lake Benbrook). This does not include the national public land of Rock Creek Park encompassing the wild and scenic roadless Rock Creek tributary downstream to Lake Benbrook.
- Owned by the Texas General Land Office, which sought to sell it to developers in 2006, and has now agreed to work with GPRC toward a conservation solution.
- The 2,000-acre Fort Worth Prairie Park holds international ecological significance. It serves as an important breeding and resting ground for the North American Monarch Butterfly Migration and Central Flyway grassland nesting birds whose numbers are declining.
- Biodiversity hotspot: Rare plant communities include up to 700 different native plant species.
- Two bison (tested genetically pure) were reintroduced successfully in 2006 to the Fort Worth Prairie Park, marking the first time in 150 years their hooves had thundered in this ecosystem. Bison (buffalo) help manage the native prairie for optimal health.
- The Fort Worth Prairie is a unique part of the most endangered major ecosystem in North America, the tallgrass prairie.
- Only several thousand acres of the once-1.3 million acre Fort Worth Prairie exist today.
- Historic and cultural significance – the Fort Worth Prairie Park was the meeting ground for numerous Prairie Tribes – indigenous Caddo and Wichita, and nomadic Comanche people. Before the Civil War, escaped African American slaves crossed the prairie to freedom in Mexico. Ruins of a settler’s old stone house, cellar, and cistern from the 1850’s remain, along with burial grounds and a mysterious, hand built rock wall almost 3 miles long.
- Of the 20 most common birds declining in North American, 8 have been recorded at the Fort Worth Prairie Park. Across North America, even once-common grassland nesting birds like bobwhite quail and Eastern meadowlark are declining drastically due to loss of prairie habitat.
Fort Worth Prairie Park Satellite Boundary Map
