Brazos Past: Before Baylor arrived, there was Waco University
By Carl Hoover
Tribune-Herald entertainment editor
Decades before Baylor University moved to Waco, the main university here carried the town’s name.
Founded as the preparatory school Trinity River High School in 1856, the school had grown into a college by 1860, named Waco Classical School and run by the Waco Baptist Association. Consisting largely of two two-story brick buildings located on Fifth Street near First Baptist Church of Waco, the school was renamed Waco University in 1861 when Rufus C. Burleson, former president of Baylor University in Independence, Texas, became the school’s president.
Burleson had left Baylor the year before after a feud with Horace Clark, principal of Baylor’s female department, and brought four of his Baylor faculty members to Waco — as well as a vision for making his school the pre-eminent Baptist university in the state.
Burleson added a women’s department in 1866, making Waco University the first coeducational school in the South, although the mingling of genders happened primarily in chapel; men’s and women’s classes were held in separate buildings.
Classes offered included English, literature, rhetoric, oratory, mathematics, Latin, chemistry, civil engineering, history, evidences of Christianity and “moral and intellectual philosophy.”
By the 1880s, the university had a student enrollment of almost 400 with 19 faculty members. Waco University consolidated with Baylor in 1886 after the latter moved from Independence. Burleson became president of Baylor, whose campus moved south to a 23-acre tract donated by the city of Waco, while the Waco University buildings became boarding houses for male Baylor students.
Sources: Eugene Baker’s To Light the Ways of Time; Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas; Handbook of Texas Online.
choover@wacotrib.com
757-5749
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