Texas Christian University

The 1910 fire closed TCU's Waco chapter, and the Handbook of Texas tells what came next. After the main building burned, Fort Worth offered a fifty-acre campus and $200,000, and the university accepted. TCU moved onto its present campus in 1911. The Waco years had begun in 1895, and the name changed to Texas Christian University in 1902. Ely Vaughn Zollars was president from 1902 to 1906, followed by Clinton Lockhart. Attendance then averaged 350 to 400 students.

What the plaque says

Texas Christian University A hundred people--faculty and students of Add-Ran Christian University (situated 1876-1895 at Thorp Spring)--reached Waco by train and marched 3 miles to this site on Christmas Eve 1895. By invitation, Add-Ran began to operate that day in unfinished building of Waco Female College, which had given up its charter after functioning since 1857. Add-Ran in 1902 became Texas Christian University. The "Horned Frog" began publication. School spirit was high, but on March 22, 1910, fire destroyed the school. Financial inducements caused T.C.U. to rebuild in Fort Worth. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Suspension Bridge — 2.2 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 — 2.2 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.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 2.6 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.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 2.8 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

• The Methodist Home — 0.5 mi
• Waco State Home — 0.9 mi
• Central Texas Baptist Sanitarium — 0.9 mi
• Proctor Springs — 1.0 mi