Taking Care of the Neighborhood
By acquiring and restoring landmarks in downtown Fort Worth, oil-company chief Bob Simpson is building a future for his company as well as for the center of town.
By Angela Shah | From Preservation | November/December 2007
Simpson in the former banking hall of the Waggoner Building
Credit: David Woo
Bob Simpson is an unlikely champion of preservation. The Fort Worth, Tex., oilman has built a fortune transforming an eight-person startup into an oil-and-gas powerhouse called XTO Energy Inc., which employs 2,300 people and is second only to Exxon Mobil in natural gas production in Texas.
So why would this successful wildcatter, whose fortunes rely on his ability to help fuel the needs of an insatiable global economy, pay any attention to the past by spending time and money reviving faded buildings in downtown Fort Worth? "It's just good business," Simpson says.
How he got to that way of thinking began on the rural plains of West Texas. A farmer's son, Simpson grew up in tiny Cisco, a detour off Interstate 20 about 100 miles west of Fort Worth. Home today to 3,900 people, Cisco is not much changed since the 1950s, when Simpson helped his father on the family's cotton farm.
Amid the life and labor of a small town, he picked up an appreciation-a love, he says-for old things. His mother adored antiques and brought her youngest son along on excursions to flea markets and antiques shows. "She taught me about beauty and value," he says. But he didn't put those childhood lessons to use until after his graduation from Baylor University in Waco, where he studied business. As a newly minted MBA, he headed to Fort Worth to work as an accountant for Arthur Andersen and began acquiring antique furniture of his own. "It's the investment side of me. I'm spending the money anyway. In the meantime, I get to look at something beautiful."
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