Miss Molly's Bed & Breakfast, Fort Worth

As the drovers on the street below brought in herd after herd of longhorns, hitting every saloon and dance hall on the way to the stockyards, the guests in the second-floor walk-up gazed down, primly elevated from the fray. In the early 1900s, the eight rooms that now make up Fort Worth's best bed-and-breakfast housed the guests of Miss Amelia Eisner's Furnished Rooms, an oh-so-proper hotel.

By the 1930s, however, the wild ways of the stockyard district had had their influence; the hotel had become an infamous brothel named for its madam, Miss Josie. When Mark and Susan Hancock renovated and reopened the abandoned space as Miss Molly's in 1989, they decided to name adjacent rooms after Miss Josie and Miss Amelia---provoking the guest to wonder whether either, or both, of the former proprietors might be turning in their graves.

Located over the Star Cafe steak house in the Fort Worth Stockyards Historic District, Miss Molly's may be the most mythically Texan of Texas's bed-and-breakfasts. The rooms, which form a circle around the registration desk at the top of the stairs, are chock-full of saddles, stirrups, cowboy hats, buckskin, and other Western paraphernalia. What keeps the whole thing from being hokey is that the artifacts are authentic: The rope that dangles from the wall mirror in one room, for example, is the actual one used to win the Fort Worth rodeo in 1928.

The rooms have been furnished to appear as they did in the 1920s: iron beds draped with colorful quilts; ceiling fans; a washstand with a bowl and pitcher. With the exception of Miss Josie's room, none of the rooms have private baths. Three bathrooms with pedestal sinks, claw-foot tubs, and pull-chain toilets stand side by side in one corner of the establishment.

Guests are encouraged to mingle; they say they measure success by the number of friends they and their visitors have made here. Guests are given custom-made blue-and-white ticking robes to wear to the copious Continental breakfast buffet, which typically features coffee cakes, muffins, biscuits and gravy, egg casserole, strawberry bread, and a fruit cup.

Location: 109 1/2 W. Exchange Ave., Fort Worth

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