Buckner Baptist Children's Home

The campus grew into one of the largest holdings in Dallas, then shrank by design. The Handbook of Texas says that by 1960 Buckner's board was selling portions of its 3,000-acre Dallas land, following the founder's provision that proceeds go into endowment, and kept the campus. In 1961 the charter became Buckner Baptist Benevolences, a network that by 1992 ran more than forty programs in seventeen Texas cities. In spring 1975 an entire Vietnamese orphanage, fleeing the Communists, took up residence at the Dallas home.

What the plaque says

Buckner Baptist Children's Home Founded out of concern for dependent, orphaned children, this institution opened in 1879 under the guidance of the Rev. Robert Cooke Buckner (d. 1919). Originally known as Buckner Orphan's Home, the first structure on this site was built in 1880 and housed six children. By 1910 the orphanage was caring for 600 children. Supported by the Baptist General Convention of Texas since 1914 and later renamed Buckner Baptist Children's Home, the facility now primarily cares for children from broken homes. For more than 100 years the Buckner home has been a leader in Texas child care. 1983

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 4.5 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 4.7 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 6.0 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 6.7 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• W.W. Glover Cemetery — 1.7 mi
• Pleasant Mound Cemetery — 1.8 mi
• Pleasant Mound "Public" Cemetery — 1.8 mi
• Site of Scyene Meeting Place — 2.4 mi