Site of Berachah Home and Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas is plain about who the home served and how. J. T. and Maggie Upchurch took in single, White, pregnant young women free of charge for a year of job training and lessons in raising a child, and did not allow adoption. Mothers who left early were labeled dishonorably discharged. Upchurch spoke against a double standard that sent the man to Congress and the woman to perdition. The surviving cemetery holds about eighty graves of women and babies, many of them dead in a measles outbreak around 1914 to 1915.

What the plaque says

Site of Berachah Home and Cemetery The Berachah Rescue Society was organized at Waco in 1894 by the Rev. J. T. Upchurch (b. 1870) for the protection of homeless girls and unwed mothers. Nine years later he opened the Berachah Industrial Home at this site. Ten buildings were located here, including a print shop for publication of the "Purity Journal". The cemetery, which contains more than eighty graves, was first used in 1904 for the burial of Eunice Williams, one of the residents. The home closed in 1935, but the site was used until 1942 as an orphanage run by Upchurch's daughter Allie Mae and her husband Frank Wiese. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 11 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 14 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 14 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.

More markers nearby

• The University of Texas at Arlington — 0.2 mi
• First Baptist Church of Arlington — 0.7 mi
• City of Arlington — 0.8 mi
• Colonel Neel E. Kearby — 0.8 mi