The profession of teaching has risen in prestige in greater Waco virtually from the city’s founding, when surveyor Jacob De Cordova set aside free lots of land for schools.

The first institutions of free, public education began here and were operated by McLennan County in 1855, when grammar schools were known as “indigent” schools. Any Wacoan with cash sent his or her children to private academies or hired an in-home tutor.

Central High School, Waco’s first, was constructed after passage of the 1882 school tax in McLennan County. The school operated from 1887 at Fourth Street and Webster Avenue until the 1911 opening of Waco High on Columbus Avenue at 8th Street. Old Central is where Willie Durham House taught from 1893 until 1904.
Waco, Texas: A Postcard Journey

At first, the county paid teachers seven cents per day per child. By the Civil War, the pay rate was about $54 per year (or $1,275 in modern funds) for a 142-day school session.

After the Civil War, even after the city government took charge of what was called the Waco Public Free School System, taxpayers continued to vote down tax referendums because “only the ‘riff-raff’ attended” free schools. In 1882, the first school tax finally passed.

1st public high school

Waco’s first principal, Jesse N. Gallagher, who went on to become a county judge as well as the first chief justice of the 10th Court of Appeals, wanted public education to succeed here, so he came up with a plan. Gallagher (1861-1942) began to eliminate the competition in the late 1880s by hiring all the private schools’ teachers in town to join the public system.

For unmarried women of the frontier-era, teaching was one of the few respectable alternatives for supporting oneself.

Although there were little to no educational standards for the instructors themselves at the time besides being functionally literate, some of Waco’s earliest female educators aspired to greater learning themselves and enrolled in “Normal Schools,” which were the equivalent of modern-day teachers’ colleges.

One such pioneering female schoolteacher of Waco’s history was Willie Durham House (1856-1926), who left Texas for Tennessee in 1878 to enroll in the University of Nashville’s Peabody Normal School.

Waco’s Carnegie Public Library, which opened to the public on Dec. 26, 1904, was a dream come true for educator Willie Durham House, who was elected in 1898 as the founding president of the Waco Library Association.
The Texas Collection at Baylor University

She returned to Texas two years later, after superior performance at Peabody, and was employed by the state’s Board of Education for several years as a teacher-trainer.

In 1884, House was hired as Waco’s female principal, and she took over the city’s third- ward school.

Five years later, she rose to the top when she was became the first-ever female superintendent of the system — and possibly the South, her contemporaries thought.

She earned about $2,000 per year (equal to $47,200 today) for her labors running the eight white and two black schools, and supervising 47 teachers and more than 2,600 students.

She was the most poorly paid superintendent of schools in the state — even though her enrollment ratios bested Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and Galveston-Houston.

Becoming librarian

House was purged from office in 1893, when control of the schools passed from the city council to a newly appointed board of trustees. She continued to teach in Waco schools until 1904, when she resigned to become the city’s first full-time professional librarian, a position she held until 1907.

She had been elected in 1898 as the founding president of the Waco Library Association and wrote the grant proposal to Andrew Carnegie, steel tycoon and philanthropist, asking for the funds to construct a munici- pal library.

Willie Durham House (1856-1926), a pioneering principal of the Waco Public Free School System, was not only the first female in that role in this city, she may well have been the first female district superintendent in the state, if not the entire South.
The History of Waco Public Schools

The three-story, $30,000 (about $700,000 in today) construction at North 12th Street and Austin Avenue was opened to the public on Dec. 26, 1904, and became a crucial link in the free, public education of the masses.

According to Waco historian Patricia Ward Wallace, who wrote about House’s deeds in much greater detail in “A Spirit So Rare: A History of the Women of Waco,” House left Waco abruptly in 1907 and only “returned” after her death on July 28, 1926, at age 70. She is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

But according to a short notice in the July 31, 1926, edition of the New York Times, House was “for several years chief of the filing and stenographic division of the Workman’s Compensation Commission” and had lived in Brooklyn.

But she must have kept a hand in the teaching field as well.

Well into the 1930’s, in fact, Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Preparatory Country Day School offered an annual $100 prize to the most improved student — an award named for Willie Durham House.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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