08/04/2026
Local history!
A Fort Worth preacher once stood in his pulpit and called a hilltop casino outside Arlington a blight on the whole county, and he vowed, in front of his own congregation, that he would own that property himself one day. Nobody believed him. Everybody should have.
Top O' Hill Terrace started out innocently enough, a tea room built along the old Bankhead Highway in the early 1920s. But once new owners took over in 1926, it transformed into one of the most exclusive illegal casinos in the entire country, built to serve the wealthy crowds pouring in from the nearby Arlington Downs racetrack. Guests passed through doors fitted with peepholes and two-way mirrors. Armed guards watched from towers along a sandstone wall, ready to signal an approaching raid, and when the alarm sounded, patrons slipped through hidden tunnels into the woods or calmly reappeared in the tea garden as though nothing had ever happened. Movie stars and business titans gambled there for two decades, protected by a level of secrecy most speakeasies could only dream of.
Pastor J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth's First Baptist Church spent years publicly condemning the place, insisting he would one day own it outright. He didn't live to see it happen, but in 1956, three years after the casino's owners had died and sold the land, his own church's seminary bought that very property and moved its school onto that same hilltop. Today it stands as Arlington Baptist University, a campus of faith and learning built directly on top of the ground where sin once ran the show every single night. If that isn't proof that the story always belongs to God in the end, it's hard to imagine what would be. ✝️
