For nearly half a century, cotton reigned as king of Waco's economy, establishing the once small frontier town as a thriving urban center known throughout the country.
The area later named Waco held a long history of agricultural pursuits tracing back to the Waco Indians' farming of crops such as melons, pumpkins, lima beans, and corn. Cotton farming and plantation culture arrived in Waco along with the first white settlers of McLennan County. Initially hesitant to plant crops in the black soil found in Central Texas, these settlers soon found the alluvial soil of the Brazos Valley and blackland prairie ideal for growing cotton.
Prior to the Civil War, cotton production in McLennan County remained relatively small. Without a means to transport the product with ease throughout the country, there was little reason to produce large amounts of cotton. Additionally, although farmers sought to recreate southern plantation life in Waco, legal restrictions placed on the number of slaves a landlord could bring into Texas prevented large-scale plantations from developing.
Cotton production slowed with the dawn of the Civil War as most Wacoans, supporting secession, left to fight. The price of cotton fell and shipments to Europe stopped completely when the Union blocked established trade routes out of the South. Yet this setback ultimately turned into Waco's first step toward industrialization when, during his search to secure passage for the crop, John Baylis Earle acquired equipment for a cotton mill in England, disassembled it, and smuggled it into Waco via Mexico. The new mill freed up considerable time for women who had previously spent hours sewing and spinning cotton.
The defeat of the South in 1865 and subsequent emancipation of slaves completely restructured plantation life. Although some freedmen left Waco, many remained in the area in altered relationships with their former owners. The large number of people desiring to farm a limited amount of land led to a new hierarchy. Unable to pay all of their former slaves a fair wage, landowners rented pieces of land to tenants and sharecroppers in exchange for a portion of the crop and profit at the end of the growing season.
The cotton industry industrialized and grew considerably in Waco during this period immediately following the Civil War. The construction of the Waco Suspension Bridge and arrival of the Waco Tap Railroad in 1870 increased the number of people and goods entering and departing the city. Waco's cotton market boomed, and by 1885, the city became known as the largest inland cotton market in Texas. When a second railroad connection arrived, it was named the Cotton Belt Route in honor of the large market to which it primarily catered.
Life in Waco came to revolve around the crop which had earned the town the name of King Cotton. Bankers loaned money against cotton crops, and the city economy boomed along with farmers' prosperity. Brokers from other states and nations opened offices in the city. Each fall, farmers from the surrounding counties arrived in the town square at daybreak to display bales for classification and sale. In 1894, the city instituted the grand annual festival named the Cotton Palace Exposition in order to honor and celebrate the central role of the crop in the local economy.
By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the cotton industry reached its peak and was already beginning a steady decline, largely due to the diversification of agriculture as well as the depletion of soil nutrients. Although no longer the enormous market force it once represented, cotton continued to play an important role in Waco's economy throughout the twentieth century, with small numbers of farmers growing cotton and local merchants continuing to offer rewards for the first bale of cotton each season. Today, small cotton farms can be seen in the countryside surrounding the city, and the legacy of the crop which once made Waco a center of the South is visible in landmarks around town such as Cottonland Castle, the silos of the old cotton oil mill, and the site of the Texas Cotton Palace.
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]]>In its early days in the 1920s, Castle Heights was just a grassy hill at the end of the streetcar line, with a clear view of the Amicable building downtown. The city of Waco has since grown miles beyond the hill, and oaks and magnolia trees have grown up to shade the neighborhood. Through the decades, Castle Heights has remained a prime address for the Waco establishment, impervious to inner-city blight.
Castle Heights has an unusually strong identity as a neighborhood. The construction of the earliest homes, circa 1888, lay outside Waco city limits, and when developers plotted the neighborhood in 1923, they expected it to serve as an elite residential area marketed to the professional and upper class. Residents fought back in court in the 1930s when Waco sought to annex them. The neighborhood incorporated as the Village of Castle Heights in 1939 and elected a mayor, A. Baker Duncan, father of modern-day civic leader Malcolm Duncan. However, the village disbanded in 1945 and was annexed into the city of Waco.
Castle Heights, with its then-novel curving streets, was an example of the early twentieth-century City Beautiful Movement, an urban planning philosophy that sought to link social issues to architectural design and encourage civic pride and engagement. Large plots of land with space for big backyards and attached garages attracted potential residents.
The eclectic architectural styles of Castle Heights provide good examples of design from several different time periods, including Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Spanish Eclectic Revival, and Minimal Traditional homes. Following World War II, the neighborhood saw a large boom in construction of homes in the ranch style. Many houses are also notable because they were designed by famous Waco architectural firms such as Birch D. Easterwood and Son, or designer of the Amicable building, Roy Lane.
Through over a decade of effort by neighborhood leaders, Castle Heights became Waco’s first historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. The district included on the historical marker encompasses most of the area north of Austin Avenue from Thirty-Third Street to Thirty-Ninth Street, including Cottonland Castle, the 1890s Gothic stone structure on Austin Avenue that gave the neighborhood its name.
Today, Castle Heights remains one of the most sought-out neighborhoods in the city. Its well-preserved homes serve as physical evidence of twentieth-century architectural and urban design in Waco.
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]]>Pauline Pipkin Garrett studied music at Baylor in the 1920s, but then the family business came a-calling. Under her leadership, W. P. Pipkin Drugs became one of the Southwest’s largest independently owned drugstore chains.
After graduating from Baylor University in 1923 with a BA in music, Pauline’s interests turned to the family business—W. P. Pipkin Drugs located at 418 Elm Avenue. Seeking to one day take over the business from her father, Pauline enrolled in the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, where she excelled. The Waco News-Tribune on December 21, 1924, reported that she made the “highest grades in her class in a competitive examination.” The article also stated that the college had three thousand men and only one hundred women enrolled at the time.
In 1926, Pauline received a BA in pharmacology, became a licensed pharmacist, and joined her father in his business. William Pipkin was the first drugstore owner in Waco to hire women. In a recollection published in the May 26, 1957, Waco Tribune-Herald, Pauline recalls a customer asking, “‘You reckon that’ll do—a girl selling cigars?’ He [W. P. Pipkin] said, ‘They’ll do better than some of these jelly beans.’ They called the boys ‘jelly beans’ in those days.”
Pauline worked in several departments, including the soda fountain where she washed dishes. In doing so, she got to know more about her employees and work practices. This would help in later years when she took over management after her father’s death in 1935, and full ownership when her mother, Irene, died in 1953. After Pauline took over full operations, the Pipkin chain then grew from three to seven stores and was recognized nationally as an award-winning seller of Rexall products—Pipkin’s main product line.
Life wasn’t all about work for Pauline—she did maintain her love for music. While in pharmacy school, according to the December 1924 Waco News-Tribune article, “She made several vocal and cello records for the Victor Company at Camden, N.J.” Back at home, she played the cello in various Waco orchestras. In 1930, she was given the opportunity to go to Europe and play with a symphony.
Pauline married Waco attorney Barney Garrett on January 15, 1936. They purchased one of Waco’s most distinctive homes, the Cottonland Castle at 3300 Austin Avenue. She dedicated one of the rooms to music, filling it with a grand piano and several string instruments.
Pauline passed away at home in 1963. Her husband sold Pipkin Drugs to a firm in Garland, Texas, and it became a Rexall drugstore. By 1967, all but one of the former seven Pipkin stores had closed, with the last location at 3900 Bosque Boulevard.
In an age where business opportunities for women were limited, Pauline Pipkin Garrett became a successful pharmacist and expanded her father's modest drug store business into a thriving enterprise with seven locations throughout Waco.
]]>One of the “go-to” guys for erecting temples to prosperity in Waco during the ragtime era (1900-18), was Roy Ellsworth Lane, who helped establish some of the earliest architectural professional organizations in Texas.
Though his structures would become well-known fixtures of Texan cityscapes, Lane spent the early part of his life in the Midwest. He studied at the University of Minnesota, where he earned degrees in architecture and civil engineering. He first practiced designing buildings in Kansas, but Lane relocated to Texas in 1907. After settling in Waco, he joined the Sanguinet and Staats architectural firm.
Lane quickly earned a reputation as a skilled architect. During the next thirty years, he designed numerous buildings in Central Texas, including the old Waco Public Library, the Hippodrome, warehouses and hotels in the business district, several schools for Waco public schools, as well as collaborating on the 22-story ALICO building, which continues to dominate the Waco skyline.
He designed courthouses in Bosque and Runnels Counties. He also designed local churches, some of which still stand, such as First Lutheran, and St. Francis on the Brazos Catholic Church. Lane’s talent can be seen throughout Waco in the number of local homes he designed for the captains of industry and other tycoons.
Much of his work can be seen, from his own portfolio, in the holdings of the Texas Collection at Baylor University. It contains sketches in his own hand as well as images shot by Fred A. Gildersleeve, the era’s leading commercial photographer.
An example of one commission is the Cottonland Castle, the stone edifice originally erected in 1890 by stone contractor John Tennant. Lane was brought in around 1910 to finish the work started at 3300 Austin Ave. When Waco’s cotton-based economy boomed, Tennant, who worked on the Provident Building and used the leftover stone on his own property, prospered as well.
That same year, Lane also designed the Flowers House (a recorded Texas Historic Landmark since 1998), 600 W. Third St. in Eddy. It was the home of local cotton-gin operator Felix A. Flowers (1870-1950) and his wife, Lucinda Mixson Flowers (1875-1949), a local social and civic leader. It is an example of the craftsman-style homes Lane mastered: the low-slung, one-story bungalows using native materials such as timber or stone, also incorporating arts-and-crafts-style light fixtures and stained glass as an integral part of the home’s wide-open floor plans. The house remained in the family of the original owners until it was sold in 1957.
Until the mid-1930s Lane lived in Waco at 520 North Fourteenth Street (see pin on the map). In 1936, Lane moved his practice to Dallas. Among his best-known works there were the Southwestern Motor Freight Bureau, the Haggar Slacks Company plant, and the Guiberson Corp. office building.
He also was the first state parks architect, an appointment he earned in 1934, after designing the facilities around White Rock Lake, in the Dallas area, for the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Lane was among the founding members of the Texas chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the Texas Association of Architects and served as president of the TAA from 1918-19. In 1954 he was elevated to an honorary membership in the Dallas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Lane died in Dallas on Aug. 7, 1956, and was buried at Restland Memorial Park.
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