By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Waco’s first day care program for the children of the working poor — Evangelia Settlement — was founded 100 years ago by Ethel Dickson and Nell Symes in a humble house on Webster Avenue.

The settlement house movement began in Great Britain in the 1880s and had spread to the United States’ major urban areas by the 1890s. Its goal was to help acclimate immigrants to middle-class society’s expectations. Some of these institutions evolved into what would now be called community centers.

The settlement house movement in Texas was also linked to affluent white women’s efforts to improve living conditions for poor children by founding charity kindergartens in slums and factory districts.

For the most part in Texas, historians record, settlement houses tended to be a collaborative effort between single, college-educated women and older married women who had experience in charity work through their churches and other social networks.

Some of Evangelia’s history in Waco is recorded at the Texas Collection at Baylor University. Rosemary Painter, Evangelia’s executive director in the late 1960s through the 1970s, gave an oral history of the organization in 1977.

“There was a woolen mill (Slayden-Kirksey) in that area of town at the time, and these two ladies opened up a little one-room house to take care of the children of working mothers,” Painter said in the oral history.

The home, at 13th Street and Webster, was the program’s sole facility until 1920, when Karem Hall was built across the street by the Karem Shrine and donated to Evangelia Settlement for its use.

In the late 1920s, a two-story frame building (known as New Main) was erected at 510 S. 12th Street, along with the A.J. Dossett baby cottage. In the late 1950s — following a joint building fund drive with the YMCA and the Salvation Army that resulted in new facilities for all three nonprofit agencies — New Main and Karem Hall were torn down and replaced by the modern brick and stone structure designed by Walter Cocke Jr. and Co. Architects.

The vision of the founders lives on in the work done by the Economic Opportunity Advancement Corporation Early Headstart program at 510 S. 12th St., not far from the original site of the settlement. Since 2002, EOAC’s program for children from infancy through age 3 has been housed in the old Evangelia Settlement building.

Johnette Hicks, executive director of EOAC, said that at first her organization called it Evangelia Early Headstart — in keeping with the history of the building — but was asked by the former owners to not use Evangelia in the name.

“But I think the founders would approve of what takes place there, caring for children,” Hicks said.

During much of its history, Painter said in her recollections, Evangelia Settlement was the social safety net for working mothers.

Some women, with evidently no husband nor family to help them raise a child, would bring their babies to the volunteer caregivers on Monday morning, and not reclaim them until Friday night, Painter recalled. They paid on a sliding scale for these services, sometimes as little as 25 cents per week during the Great Depression.

When Evangelia Settlement was formally chartered by the state in 1912, it was the oldest such child care welfare agency in Waco, Painter said. The Texas Collection’s files on the organization, which extend back to 1915, note that finances were always a challenge.

For the first few decades, Evangelia was mostly supported by several area churches. In the 1930s, the Community Chest (precursor to today’s United Way) took on primary funding, along with civic-minded individuals. In the 1960s, federal funding became the main source of operating income.

Sources: Texas Collection at Baylor University, Handbook of Texas Online.