By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The F.L. Carroll Chapel and Library has been at the core of Baylor University’s historic Rufus C. Burleson Quadrangle since the library’s completion in 1903.

Students and local scholars had been wishing for a central library at the university since Baylor came to Waco in 1886. Various library materials were scattered among five literary societies and smaller libraries around campus, making research difficult.

F.L. Carroll, Baylor treasurer and a university trustee, donated the $75,000 needed to build the library and chapel. The Alabama native had moved to Waco in 1882 from Beaumont, where he was a prosperous lumber manufacturer.

Construction started in 1902, and in April 1903 the building was dedicated, with holdings of about 18,000 volumes from the Erisophian, Philomathesian, Adelphian, Calleopean, and Burleson societies.

A fire that started on the roof on Feb. 11, 1922, destroyed the library, although many items were saved. The Baylor Alumni Association led the effort to raise money for a new building. The $200,000 Carroll Library was completed the following year, but didn’t have a chapel nor the original structure’s distinctive copper dome.

During the next five decades, various offices and academic departments have occupied the Carroll Library — including the Strecker Museum, the J.B. Tidwell Bible Library, the law library and the Browning Library.

In 1968, the main library moved to the newly opened Moody Memorial Library. In 1993, the university renovated the Carroll building, and today it remains a scholarly resource for the university community and greater Waco.

The Texas Collection has called the Carroll Library home for most of its 85 years; however, from the fall of 1939 until mid-1955, the collection was kept in Pat Neff Hall. It began in 1923, when Waco physician Kenneth Hazen Aynesworth presented Baylor with more than 1,000 items from his personal collection of Texas history materials.

Since its modest beginning on shelves in a library alcove, the collection has grown to encompass three floors of the Carroll Library, as well as off-site shelving.

The current holdings include more than 120,000 books, more than 2,200 periodicals and more than 13,000 audio-visual pieces. In addition, the extensive Archives Division holdings include 62,000 photographs, more than 3,600 oral history tapes/transcripts, approximately 4,000 maps and hundreds of linear feet of manuscripts and other archival materials.

Sources: Ellen Brown, associate director and archivist, Texas Collection at Baylor University; Handbook of Texas Online; The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas.

‘Women at War’

Women have played a crucial role in the nation’s wars, and not just by tending to the home front and replacing men in factories. Learn more about how women contributed in military roles by attending “Women at War,” the next free public presentation sponsored by the Waco History Project. The event will take place at 7 p.m. Nov. 6 at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post No. 6008, 725 Sun Valley Blvd. in Hewitt.