By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

In the years following the Civil War, thousands of cowboys on cattle drives would slake their thirst in the saloons of Six-Shooter Junction, as Waco was known in those days.

Ironically, Waco has also been a church-going town almost from the days of its founding in 1849. As a center of Baptist culture — a denomination known to frown on alcohol — Waco saw the two sides of the wet-dry divide tangle repeatedly at the ballot box.

For example, McLennan County residents in 1854 voted 120 to 96 to ban liquor sales, according to historian Patricia Ward Wallace of Baylor University. But because the state overrode the county, liquor sales continued here, she wrote.

In 1873, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in Fredonia, N.Y., with the goal of prohibiting alcohol sales across America. Members advanced their cause by entering saloons and dropping to their knees to sing hymns and pray, to pressure saloon keepers to stop selling alcohol and customers to stop consuming it.

The WCTU arrived in Texas in 1881, when its national president, Frances Willard, delivered a series of lectures to women’s organizations throughout the state.

In 1885, some 25 Waco women formed a local branch of the Young Ladies Christian Temperance Union, and in 1892, the local branch of its adult version, the WCTU, was formed.

The WCTU held its 1887 state convention at First Baptist Church of Waco, with 74 delegates in attendance, Wallace wrote in her 1986 book, A Spirit So Rare: A History of the Women of Waco. When these ardent prohibitionists lost an amendment campaign that year to stop liquor sales in the state, the local temperance union rang church bells all day in mourning.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Waco’s prohibitionists were led by Mother Sweeney (Mrs. S.J. Sweeney). This crusader reported at the state convention of 1909 that she had distributed more than 91,000 pieces of teetotaler literature, conducted more than 200 temperance meetings and 300 gospel services, written more than 6,200 letters for the cause and recorded 12,000 pledges of abstinence.

McLennan County eventually went dry in 1917. The state followed in 1918, and the nation in 1920 (for a 13-year social experiment called Prohibition).

Incidentally, the WCTU — which calls itself the oldest continuing nonsectarian women’s organization in the United States — is still around, crusading against alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, abortion and same-sex relations — substances and practices members see as harmful to society.

Sources: Handbook of Texas Online; http://herbsociety-stu.org, TexasEscapes.com,