Brazos Past: Portraits of early Waco
By Terri Jo Ryan
Tribune-Herald staff writer
Waco was one hopping little town in the years following the Civil War, with its population more than quadrupling from the 1870 U.S. Census to the 1890 survey — from 3,008 to 14,445.
Among the businesses listed in the first City Directory (1876) were the 103-room McClelland Hotel, five newspapers, a telegraph office, an ice factory, two flour mills, two foundries, a carriage shop and 158 other shops housed in brick buildings.
The city was also home to a number of photography studios, whose visual artists captured the movers and shakers of the day.
A leading image-maker was Jervis C. Deane, of Waco, who had lost his right eye to red-hot flying debris in 1896 while photographing the Crash at Crush, the staged train wreck north of town. After a settlement from the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad for his injuries, he resumed his career and reopened his shop on Austin Avenue.
Before landing in Waco in the late 1880s, Deane worked as a house painter in Hannibal, Mo.; studied photography in Europe; and toured the United States as an itinerant photographer. After his arrival around 1888, he partnered with Forrest T. Morgan for three years and worked in Waco until 1901.
Sources: Biographies of Western Photographers, by Carl Mautz; Ancestry.com; Genealogy.com; TexasEscapes.com; Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, edited by Dayton Kelley; WACO: A Sesquicentennial History, by Patricia Ward Wallace.
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