DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll pass it along just the same. Now, they called it the Wall Street of the West — and friend, that is not a nickname you stumble into. That is a nickname you earn.
Let me tell you how two brothers-in-law from Fort Worth helped earn it. By 1920, Joseph Casner Woody and Jefferson Davis Kutch, Jr. were both already active in the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company — that central buying location where regional cattle ranchers, sheep ranchers, and hog farmers all came to do their dealings. Woody and Kutch were in the thick of it.
Now these two men were brothers-in-law, which means they already knew each other's temperaments before they ever signed a business agreement together. That is either a tremendous advantage or a recipe for catastrophe, and in this case it appears to have been the former. In 1923, they incorporated the Woody-Kutch Livestock Commission Company of North Fort Worth — Woody as president, Kutch as vice president.
Their office sat inside the Livestock Exchange Building, where they ran a clearinghouse processing the receipts of sales. Just picture that building for a moment. Forty-eight livestock commission companies operating under one roof.
Forty-eight. All that volume, all that activity, all those transactions moving through a single structure day after day — and so the building acquired its reputation, and with it that name: the Wall Street of the West. Joseph Casner Woody lived from 1880 to 1950.
When he passed, the partnership as it had been could not continue on in quite the same form. But Jefferson Davis Kutch, Jr. — a man who, for the record, lived from 1890 all the way to 1990, a full century on this earth — was not done. He and a man named J.D.
Farmer started fresh, launching the Farmer-Kutch Livestock Commission Company. And that outfit kept its doors open and kept doing business until 1981. A hundred years of living, and Kutch spent the better part of it in the livestock trade.
The Wall Street of the West didn't build itself — it took men like these, showing up, dealing straight, and keeping the cattle moving.
What the marker says
In 1920, brothers-in-law Joseph Casner Woody (1880-1950) and Jefferson Davis Kutch, Jr. (1890-1990) were both active in the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company, a central buying location for regional cattle and sheep ranchers and hog farmers. They incorporated the Woody-Kutch Livestock Commission Company of North Fort Worth in 1923, with Woody as president and Kutch as vice president. Their office in the Livestock Exchange Building was a clearinghouse to process receipts of sales. For all its activity and volume of business, the building which housed 48 livestock commission companies was known as the "Wall Street of the West." After Woody's death, Kutch and J.D. Farmer started Farmer-Kutch Livestock Commission Company, which operated until 1981. (2019)