When you're walking through Sundance Square today, it's easy to forget what a rough and tumble western town Fort Worth used to be.
Now Fort Worth business owner Brent Hull is working to rediscover that history, and it earned him a place on the History Channel.
The new show "Lone Star Restoration" premiered Monday night, and Hull gave NBC 5 a look behind the scenes.
"You come into a space like this, you go what was going on in here?" Hull said, looking around an empty room in a building on North Main Street.
"You start looking at things, you start dating things," he added.
It's all a hunt for clues, to figure out what a building used to be, how old it is. Even something as simple as a doorknob can tell you that a building dates back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, and just like that, a door opens to history.
"Butch Cassidy was down there, I mean it was notorious," Hull said, of life in Fort Worth in that time period.
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Hull collects those hidden clues, as he restores old buildings and reclaims history through his Fort Worth business Hull Historical.
"The personality of Fort Worth is different than Dallas," said Hull. "They seem to care more about their history. They seem to care more about their roots, their traditions."
Hull is bringing those traditions to his new History Channel show.
"The 'Oh, wow!' moment is really what we're going for," said Hull. "That point where people say, That's right, I forgot.'"
Take the building he showed NBC 5 on North Main Street. It's transforming into a business called Into the West Unique Home Furnishings.
"We see it every day with our furniture. If it's old – an old door made into a table, things like that – people love that stuff," said Into the West's owner, Jack McDonald. "This building fits what we do very well."
Hull's sleuthing tells us it used to be a bank downstairs and upstairs, a brothel.
"The idea was that the cowboys came down to the stockyards, sold their cattle, got a big paycheck, cashed it and went upstairs!" said Hull.
The good, the bad and the ugly, it's our history, just waiting to live again.
"Lone Star Restoration" airs Monday nights on the History Channel. There are seven more episodes left this season.
It's all shot in North Texas and about 80 percent of the properties featured are in Fort Worth, all historic homes and businesses. The building featured in this story will be the final reveal on the show when it's done.
