Bosqueville Baptist Church

The Bosque Academy opened in 1854 under Cumberland Presbyterian minister John C. Collier, and Methodists used its rooms as well. By 1860 it had 180 students in an academy for boys and a seminary for young ladies, and it later added a conservatory of music. The Civil War closed it. It reopened as the nonsectarian Bosque College and Seminary, which claimed to be the country's first coeducational school; the Handbook of Texas reports that only as its claim. The plaque names this schoolhouse only as Bosqueville College, where the Baptists met.

What the plaque says

Bosqueville Baptist Church The Rev. S.G. O'Bryan organized this church in Nov. 1854. Frank Broadus, N.W. Brain, W.S.Gill, Mr. and Mrs. W.R. and Mrs. S.F. Sparks were charter members. They met in a log schoolhouse, and later at Bosqueville College. In 1887 the Bosque Masonic Lodge and this church jointly built a meeting house that burned within four months. The first sanctuary was completed in 1895; present one in 1917. One of the oldest rural congregations in McLennan County, this church has worshiped without interruption since 1854. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 1.5 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 5.6 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 5.8 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 6.2 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.

More markers nearby

• Bosqueville Cemetery — steps away
• Camp MacArthur, World War I Training Camp — 2.8 mi
• Waco State Home — 3.0 mi
• Louis Moore — 3.8 mi