The Methodist Home

Waco won the orphanage with a gift. After the Northwest Texas Conference voted in November 1890 to build one, a Methodist committee chose the city in 1893 because it donated a ten-acre estate with a sixteen-room house, according to Waco History. W. H. Vaughn and his wife Pauline moved in at the start of 1894 as the first superintendent couple, and twenty-six children lived there by year's end. The evangelists Abe and Louisa Mulkey pledged one night's revival offerings to the home, which paid for the 1899 administration building. Its cornerstone read "Preached, prayed, and sung up."

What the plaque says

The Methodist Home The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, appointed the Rev. Joseph S. Key as Bishop for the Northwest Texas Conference of the denomination in 1890. Bishop Key, who had previously worked with methodist orphanages in Georgia, saw an immediate need for a similar institution in Texas. With the help of the Rev. Dr. Horace Bishop, Pastor of Waco's Fifth Street Methodist Church (now First United Methodist), Key secured the 27-acre Emily W. Martin estate and large Miller Family residence at this site for an orphanage. The Rev. W.H. Vaughn served as the Methodist Home's first administrator. The first orphan was welcomed in April 1894, and by the end of that year the home was caring for twenty-six children. As the number of programs and residents increased, the campus was enlarged and additional buildings were erected. By the 1920s the home instituted vocational and college training programs. In the later 1930s cottages replaced dormitory housing and a chapel was built at the highest point on the campus. An associated boys' ranch opened east of the main campus in 1971 and in recent years programs have expanded to include community counseling and foster care. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Suspension Bridge — 1.7 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 — 1.9 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 — 2.4 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.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 2.7 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.

More markers nearby

• Proctor Springs — 0.4 mi
• Texas Christian University — 0.5 mi
• Mount Zion United Methodist Church — 0.9 mi
• Waco City Waterworks — 0.9 mi