Brazos Past: McLennan County's planting culture
By Terri Jo Ryan
Tribune-Herald staff writer
Much of Waco’s long history has revolved around agriculture. In fact, it was the fertile soil near the Bosque and Brazos rivers that attracted many of Waco’s first settlers from the Deep South, according to local historian Roger Conger.
While people may think of Texas’ pioneer days as a cattle culture, he wrote, “McLennan County was actually a planter culture, because the leaders who came here in the 1850s — the first decade of Waco history — were almost all, even the lawyers, from a planter culture over in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and elsewhere.”
These planters brought slaves with them from Alabama and Mississippi to work the land, he added. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, McLennan County had a white population of 3,799 and a slave population of 2,404, according to Conger, author of A Pictorial History of Waco and numerous other local history books.
From 1874 until 1930, farmers came to the public square in Waco to peddle their produce and haggle over corn and cotton with commodities dealers. The City Council, citing traffic congestion and unsanitary conditions, voted in 1930 to ban farm wagons from downtown. After a court challenge by disgruntled growers failed, Waco police in November 1930 began removing farm wagons from the square and sending them to a new market on First Street near the Suspension Bridge.
In 1932, the ordinance was repealed at the request of downtown businessmen, but the square never regained its stature as a farmer’s market, local historians noted.
Sources: Handbook of Texas Online; The Papers of George S. and Jeffie O.A. Conner, Texas Collection, Baylor University; “The Square From Every Corner,” Margaret Logue Sudderth, Waco History Project.
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