By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The life of a country doctor at the turn of the 20th century was harsh.

Clients who couldn’t afford to pay in cash could only offer barter. Physicians could be called out at any hour of the night. And they risked their own health by caring for the most ill of their era.

Add the overlay of institutional racism and Jim Crow social laws, in effect from 1876 to 1965, and you begin to understand the lot of the black Texas physician during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The earliest black doctor on record in Waco was Dr. James M. Vandavell Sr., who practiced here from 1884 until his death in 1893. The 1886 city directory listed his office at 509 Austin Ave. He later moved to 117 Bridge St.

That first office, incidentally, was located in the back of a white-owned drug store operated by A.E. Peeler, according to an oral history taken for African-American Heritage in Waco, by Dr. Garry H. Radford Sr., from Vandavell’s widow, Mrs. A. Vandavell-Jones.

The first Waco-born black physician to practice in his hometown was Monroe Alpheus Majors (1864-1960), according to records at the Texas Collection at Baylor University and the Handbook of Texas Online.

Majors went to Austin at age 14 for pre-med studies at Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson College). After he graduated in 1886 from Central Tennessee College’s medical school in Nashville, the young doctor practiced in several small towns in Texas.

He returned to Waco about 1890, after the birth of his daughter with wife Georgia A. Green. In addition to his practice, he taught hygiene and sanitation at Paul Quinn College and edited the Texas Searchlight newspaper, a periodical devoted to black issues. He founded the town’s first black hospital and practiced at 117 Bridge St. and then at 511 S. Second St.

He moved to Chicago in 1901, where he was active in civic and political affairs, especially in racial issues, then to Los Angeles in 1933, where he died on Dec. 10, 1960.

Among Majors’ colleagues in 1890s Waco was prominent black healer George Sherman Conner (1864-1939), a Tennessee native who made his life and fortune here, with a career spanning 45 years.

After graduating as valedictorian from Flint Medical College of New Orleans, Conner arrived in Waco on June 19, 1894.

Twenty years later, he and undertaker W.S. Willis opened a three-story tower for black professionals, the Conner-Willis Building, at 131 1/2 S. Second St. at Franklin Ave. Shops were on the first floor; medical and dental offices on the second floor, and insurance companies and fraternal organizations on the third.

The Conner-Willis building was heavily damaged in the May 11, 1953, tornado that ripped through downtown Waco, but was repaired and re-opened. It was demolished in the federal Urban Renewal projects of the late 1960s.

Sources: Institute for Oral History, Baylor University; Texas Collection, Baylor; Handbook of Texas Online; Military Medicine, (June 1999) by John M. Hyson Jr.; African-American Heritage in Waco, by Dr. Garry H. Radford Sr.