Over the years, Hebrew Rest has served as a place of comfort and remembrance for Jews in Waco. More than just a burial place, the cemetery’s headstones speak to the city’s rich Jewish heritage. One of Waco’s founding fathers, Jacob de Cordova, was a…

The Watson Feed Store is an inseparable part of downtown Mart. Built over 100 years ago, it still stands proudly at its place along Texas Avenue. In 1903, Ruff Watson moved to Mart and purchased property in the middle of town. He constructed a…

On a muggy, Texas summer night in 1982, tragedy struck. Three Waxahachie teenagers—Raylene Rice, Jill Montgomery, and Kenneth Franks—were murdered in Speegleville Park, near Lake Waco, on July thirteenth. In the following months, a complex criminal…

First Presbyterian Church of Waco is one of McLennan County’s oldest Protestant congregations, formed several years before Waco’s incorporation as a city. On April 20, 1855, a group of Presbyterians in Waco Village petitioned the Central Texas…

Though not uncommon to late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century cities, red-light districts were regarded as areas of ill repute where madams and prostitutes worked outside the law. Yet in 1889, Waco—a city lauded for its multitude of educational…

Centered in Waco as one of the nation’s premier shops for hand-crafted cowboy hats, Standard Hat Works has been serving customers from near and far for over 100 years. William Gross, a Hungarian immigrant to the United States, founded what…