Join Us on August 14th, 2025 at 7pm for the NFWHS Meeting.

Special Guest will be author Jim Pitts and will tell us about

The Last Shamrock,

The story of ragtag refugees from the Great Depression in Fort Worth, who stumble along different paths to become Bridie O’Driscoll’s guests at an abandoned Northside convent about a mile from our museum.

The characters in this historical novel are real people -- homeless women with children, an ex-convict, orphans, a gun-toting bootlegger, an uprooted farm family, an affable alcoholic doctor, a lonely widower with three sons, a pimp and his lady, and a raft of other wandering souls and castoffs during America’s darkest decade.

Thrown together in a rambling, fifty-room nunnery, they shovel manure at the stockyards, pick cotton, do bookkeeping, unload railroad cars, wash sheets at a hospital…anything for a dollar a day. 

They also run a poker parlor in the nuns’ dormitory, bootleg whiskey from a still in the basement and pursue other enterprises just beyond the law. 

On hard days, Bridie hocks her magic gold shamrock for food, coal and other temporal needs. Won at a dance contest in Ireland, the three-leaf clover—crafted by fairies, she believes—had once gotten her to New York and a new life as a Broadway chorus girl.

Step back with us into this heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, story of a motley group of strangers who struggle together through this era of Prohibition and poverty, depression and despair and become known as the greatest generation. 

*Free Parking available on the west side of the Livestock Exchange Building.

*If you have questions, email Teresa at nfwhs@sbcglobal.net or call 817-625-5082.