Marguerite Ethel Webb Cooper was a 22-year-old student at Texas Christian University in Waco a century ago. She was in the middle of a play rehearsal with the drama club when a tragedy of a different sort unfolded before her very eyes.

According to her 1977 oral memoirs on file at The Texas Collection at Baylor University, Cooper was in the chapel on the top floor of the almost- 20-year-old Old Main building when the fire alarm sounded.

The structure, once home to the defunct Waco Female College, was ablaze, and everyone in the premises at 8:30 p.m. March 22, 1910, had only minutes to escape. Luckily, everyone managed to escape.

“We ran, and I don’t know to this day whether I slid down the bannister or ran down, but I got down,” Cooper told the interviewer in 1977.

She and a sister had been training to become “singing evangelists” while attending the school, which had relocated to Waco in 1895 from Thorp Spring, Texas, as AddRan Christian College.

The Webb sisters said the building was too far gone by the time Waco firefighters came to assist.

“The fire could be seen for 50 miles, people said,” recalled Cooper, who graduated from TCU in 1911 with bachelor of arts and oratory degrees. She later taught school at West Junior High for many years and cheered up sick soldiers serving at Camp MacArthur in Waco from 1917-19.

Another eyewitness and survivor of the fire, then-18-year-old Amboline Tyson Mahaffey — sister of Waco High football coaching legend Paul Tyson — said in her 1977 oral memoirs that as students flowed out the building, some tried to salvage their belongings along the way.

“But what we didn’t take, somebody got in and stole. That was awful!” she said.

Tyson’s recollection was that the TCU semester was completed through creative scheduling; classes took place on the lawn, in the dining halls and the girls’ homes.

She was a prep school student during the semester of the fire. She graduated in 1915 and taught in a one-room schoolhouse outside her native Santa Anna.

TCU’s stay in Waco was less than 15 years. The school — known from its 1873 founding in Thorp Spring by brothers Addison and Randolph Clark as AddRan Male and Female College until 1889 — was a Christmas present to the city of Waco in 1895.

On Dec. 25, the school entire school — students, faculty and staff — arrived by train with their luggage shipped free-of-charge. It was all part of the inducement the city of Waco and the Disciples of Christ, or Christian Churches, offered the summer before to get university founders to leave Thorp Spring.

Church leaders agreed to deed over to TCU the defunct Waco Female College (1860-95), about 15 acres in Waco’s northwestern suburbs, and to build a dormitory for boys — provided it did not cost more than $5,000, which would be almost $128,000 today.

Waco’s Commercial Club touted the municipal delights of “Ten Railway Outlets!” and “The Seventh Longest Suspension Bridge in the World!”

A warm welcome

Other churches, private schools and even Rufus C. Burleson, then the president of Baylor University, welcomed the new institution to town.

The first contingent to Waco arrived at the bleak hilltop, 15 acres unbroken by trees or shrubs, “made all the more stark by the single, massive brick building at the center,” according to one contemporary account.

More than three miles from the nearest railway, and a 30-minute streetcar ride from downtown, the campus faced North 18th Street and extended between Lyle and Alexander avenues. The immense Old Main, with brick walls 18 to 24 inches thick, was thought to be fireproof, although the floors, stairways and roof were wooden.

The structure was larger than any building on the Baylor campus at the time.

The night of March 22, 1910, as many lads were making their way back to their rooms for the study hours, two students on the fourth floor spotted the fire — Carl Melton of Allen and Roy Tomlinson of Hillsboro. They raised the alarm, and everyone got out in time.

Although the student enrollment records of 1889-1901 were saved from the ash-heap, all the minutes of board of trustee meetings from 1902-10 were lost in the fire.

The insurance money was paltry and represented only a modest restitution toward paying down debts against the structure. Because the prospect of Waco’s citizenry to provide funds for rebuilding was largely doubtful, several Texas cities, including Dallas, began a bidding war to attract the school to their environs.

Even with Waco businessman John S. Fall offering to put up $40,000 for the university to stay, TCU accepted an offer from the city of Fort Worth, which included a campus of 50 acres isolated from the center of the bustling cowtown metropolis, about $200,000 cash and the assurance of connection to municipal utilities and streetcar service.

Meanwhile, after the trustees’ decision in May 1910 to move the school, several futile attempts were made to repurpose the soon-to-be abandoned campus.

One thought was to use it as a girls’ Christian orphanage or a Hebrew university. Another plan called for the establishment of a State Normal School (teachers’ college), and the site was even used as a temporary hospital until it suffered another fire.

Finally, in February 1912, the entire site was sold to a real estate company, which divvied it up into residential lots.

Sources: The Texas Collection at Baylor University; “History of TCU: A College of the Cattle Frontier, by Colby Dixon Hall” (1947); “Texas Christian University: A Hundred Years of History, by Jerome A. Moore” (1974); TCU.edu; Handbook of Texas Online.