St. James United Methodist Church, originally a Methodist Episcopal church, has existed almost as long as the city of Waco itself. Founded in 1874 by Anderson Brack, a formerly enslaved man, the congregation started with roughly fifty-three members. On the banks of the Brazos River, they worshipped, communed together, and worked to establish a permanent brick-and-mortar building that would serve as a central location for their Christian community. Along with the church, St. James also established a school that provided education to Black children in the Waco area. As they sought to secure a steady meeting place, though, they faced difficulty and discrimination.
Built in 1889, their original building at Second and Ross Streets was the first brick church for African Americans in Waco. St. James, established after Mt. Zion, was the second African American church in the city. After the city of Waco condemned their new building, they built a larger tabernacle in 1909 in the same location. They worshipped there until 1922. That year, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad Company purchased the property, citing eminent domain, and the St. James congregation built once more. This time, on Second and Clay Avenue.
Under the leadership of Pastor C. S. Williams, the congregation broke ground on the church in March 1924. Utilizing bricks from their previous tabernacles inside the new structure, St. James memorialized and honored the history of their church. Architect Carleton Adams, who garnered statewide and national attention for his home and building designs in San Antonio, developed plans for the Tudor Gothic-style structure. While members were eager to meet in the new location, the congregation experienced financial strain in the years to come after accumulating $85,000 in debt to construct the building, which took thirty-two years to repay.
At Second and Clay, St. James committed themselves to racial justice initiatives in the community as well as interracial partnerships. During the Great Depression, they offered a daily soup kitchen to Wacoans in need. They also held meetings for the “Waco Forward” movement of the 1920s that launched as a local effort to assist those struggling amid economic stagnation. Waco Forward hoped to improve Waco’s economy and usher in an era of progress and stability. St. James also hosted other interracial events, including concerts and women’s groups, as well as a “Race Relations Sunday” service in February 1945. There, they called for attendees to “build a nation and a world where there shall be no discrimination on the basis of color, creed, or national origin.”
After its formation in 1936, the McLennan County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) met multiple times at St. James. At an “NAACP Sunday” event in 1951, which occurred during the civil rights movement, the McLennan County chapter formed a plan that addressed local and national needs. They also hosted another notable meeting in 1955, where the organization expressed their support of the “Free by ‘63” campaign. This campaign effort raised funds for numerous legal cases taking place during the movement. Those a part of the NAACP and the church sought to address and end discrimination in Texas and across the country.
Important to Waco and St. James, multiple prominent members worked within and outside of the church. Robert L. Smith, one of the first Black Americans elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1894, attended St. James. Prior to his arrival in Waco, Smith established the Farmers’ Improvement Society, which aided farmers who had fallen into extensive debt. Inescapable debt particularly impacted previously enslaved people who turned to sharecropping and tenant farming after emancipation. As Smith worked for these communities in Waco, he also served as a steward and legal adviser for the church. J. J. Flewellen and Professor J. S. Henry, principals at Carver High and Kirk Elementary, also attended St. James. Both schools offered educational opportunities to Black students in Waco. Lonnie Morris Belle Hodges, the church’s historian, strove to bring attention to the history of St. James. As the only living descendent of St. James’s charter members with continuing membership, Hodges worked to attain recognition for the history of the congregation and building. In 1986, the building received a Recorded Texas Historical Marker due to her efforts.
The congregation continued to grow over the years, exceeding over six hundred members during their strongest periods. Yet, by 2015, St. James had dwindled once more to fewer than sixty congregants. Deciding to focus more on fellowship and community rather than upkeep of an aging structure, they placed the historic building on the market. The church received a City of Waco Historic Landmark in 2017 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 12, 2019. St. James remains the only religious structure on the National Register of Historic Places in Waco. The building, purchased by local Wacoans Amy and Lane Murphy, remains a prominent historical landmark for the city. As they transition the church into a restaurant and event space, they plan to preserve the history of the congregation and the building. Members of St. James now meet in another location in Waco, joining with Wesley United Methodist Church each Sunday. There, they continue to commune and worship together. Through the remaining congregation and renovation efforts at Second and Clay, the long history of St. James United Methodist Church persists in Waco.
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]]>Rebecca Pines Shelton Sparks, often referred to as Mother Sparks, was a laywoman from Missouri who moved to Texas with her family before the Civil War. Sparks married a Confederate veteran of the Texas Calvary and a Texas Ranger, Thaddeus Pinckney Sparks, and the Sparkses moved to McLennan County in the 1870s. There, Thaddeus Sparks accumulated wealth as a saddle-maker, and secretary of the Waco Improvement Company and First National Bank. Towards the turn of the century, Waco was booming with industrial business in which men such as Thaddeus Sparks prospered, and a growing number of women wanted a chance to be a part of it. The Waco workforce took a turn as women left rural areas because of poor crop yields and low cotton prices and moved to the big city to pursue new opportunities as businesswomen.
Because of her great enthusiasm for missionary work through the Methodist Church, Sparks used her skills and family money for the greater good. Most women who moved to the city were inexperienced, received a small salary, and could not pay the rent for higher-priced boardinghouses, so Sparks stepped in to meet that need. In 1900, Sparks established a cooperative home for middle-class working women in Waco at 1118 Franklin Avenue. Sponsored by the Methodist Mission Federation, the Rebecca Sparks Co-operative Home’s mission was to provide women with safe, chaperoned surroundings that allowed them to comfortably transition into the workforce. Students of Baylor University also stayed under the roof.
Local citizens furnished the rooms of the house and rules allowed twenty-four residents to stay under the roof at one time. Residents paid thirty-six cents per day and were required to clean their living spaces in order to stay in the cooperative home. The tenants shared spaces and socialized in a common area that included a piano, record player, games, and reading materials. The young women grew close and spent time together making candy, sewing, sharing magazines, and hosting parties in which they could invite their friends. All activities took place under the supervision of a deaconess of the Methodist church.
Mismatched chairs and impersonal decorations filled the home, suggesting that the house had an atmosphere formed by a variety of people rather than a single family. Over the years, furniture became shabby from use, repairs needed to be made, and furnishes of the house needed to be touched up to provide the residents with comfort and to ease their minds from the workday. Methodist women of Waco held fundraisers in the form of country fairs to raise funds to update the home.
The Methodist Church sponsored the cooperative home, and even though girls were not required to be a part of the Methodist denomination, religious training was an emphasis of the home’s mission and a requirement of the residents. Religious leaders adorned the mantle in the common room to remind tenants that Sparks’s home was a Christian one. Every girl attended church and Sunday school, led prayers before meals, and took turns leading evening prayer services known as Vespers. These communal activities led the women of the house to live together harmoniously.
Sparks fell ill in 1919 and passed away in 1920, and the home was renamed the Rebecca Sparks Inn. The cooperative home continued to provide a space for working women sixteen years after Sparks’s death. The facility closed in 1936, and the home’s lumber was taken for the construction of Rebecca Sparks Memorial Methodist Church in Bellmead, Texas, to honor Sparks, who provided a haven for countless young women who called the place home.
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]]>First United Methodist Church marks its founding year as 1850, when the Rev. Joseph Perkins Sneed, a circuit-riding Methodist minister, preached to the inhabitants of Waco Village at the foot of Jackson Street on the banks of the Brazos River. Legend has it he bedded down under a tree near the old river ford, where travelers crossed the waters in the years before the construction of the suspension bridge. Sleeping on his saddle blanket, the howling of wolves awakened the preacher just before dawn.
In the summer of 1851, Methodists built the first church structure in Waco. The building would also be used periodically by Baptists and Presbyterians, both forming congregations in the young village. Composed of oak and cedar wooden planks planed at a horse-drawn sawmill just south of the town, the original church stood at Second Street and Jackson Avenue.
In 1858, the congregation erected a new brick church at Franklin Avenue and Third Street. People reportedly traveled by wagon or horseback as far as 100 miles to attend the dedicatory services. The congregation at the time was almost 160 people. That congregation sold that structure a decade later, and the city’s Methodists met in the second-floor auditorium of Waco Female College.
The cornerstone for Fifth Street Methodist Church—which wouldn’t become First Methodist until 1920—was laid in 1876, and construction lasted more than two years on the edifice designed by W. C. Dodson. The inaugural service took place in November 1879. First Church, known as the Mother of Methodism in Central Texas, helped other congregations sprout throughout McLennan County, and served as a leader in the movement to bring the Methodist Children’s Home to Waco in the early 1890s.
First Methodist celebrated its first century in March 1950, with a two-night pageant featuring 150 church members and a historical plaque unveiling with Texas Governor Allan Shivers, as well as radio coverage in Waco and Dallas. Just three years later, on May 11, 1953, the tornado that swept through downtown Waco and killed 114 people heavily damaged the church. The steeple, a well-known community landmark, toppled from the winds, falling across the railroad tracks that ran past the church. Although the tornado caused considerable damage to the church, community contributions allowed the totally refurbished First Methodist building to be re-dedicated within six months, in better shape than it had been before the storm, according to most accounts.
In the mid-twentieth century, the decision was made to move the congregation to a plot of more than five acres of donated land in Northwest Waco. Members broke ground in April 1962 at Lake Air and Cobbs Drives for the facility that they dedicated in March 1963. The old First Methodist—the circa-1877 downtown structure—was demolished in September 1963. Bricks made of Brazos River sand, the baptismal font, plaster cherubs, and stained glass windows, and the 1953 steeple were left behind to be salvaged and sold by the demolition crew. Yet some pieces of the historic structure transitioned to the new space, including the 1876 cornerstone (given a prominent place in the history corner of the church foyer) and the old theater organ (a hand-me-down from the Waco Hippodrome when the days of silent movies ended in 1928). In July 2019, First Methodist "reunited" with Austin Avenue United Methodist Church and the latter became First Methodist's Downtown campus. Today, First United Methodist Church of Waco carries on the congregation’s long tradition of providing a faith community focused upon worship, faith formation, service, and outreach.
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]]>Since 1894, the Methodist Children’s Home has provided a home and family for needy children in Central Texas. Though its role in the community has changed over the years, its devotion to helping the most vulnerable in society has remained constant.
In the late nineteenth century, Methodist Bishop Joseph S. Key saw the profound need for an institution to care for the plight of orphans in Texas. He enlisted the help of Dr. Horace Bishop, the pastor of Waco’s First Methodist Church, and drew up plans to present at the Northwest Texas Methodist Conference in Abilene. In November of 1890, the conference unanimously voted for the creation of an orphanage, proclaiming that “practical religion cares for the helpless.”
A Methodist committee met in 1893 to determine a suitable location for the home and elected Waco after the city donated a ten-acre estate, including a sixteen-room residence. Dr. W. H. Vaughn, the first superintendent of the home, and his wife Pauline, moved in at the beginning of 1894. By the end of that year, twenty-six children lived at the Northwest Texas Conference Orphans Home.
The home’s primary source of support during its early years came from special offerings collected at Christmas by the five regional Texas Methodist conferences. Despite the generosity of the congregations, these funds did not fully support the rapidly growing orphanage. By the end of 1895, forty-three children resided at the facility and homes in the local community cared for twenty-one others. Moved by the orphanage’s important work and financial struggles, Methodist evangelists Abe and Louisa Mulkey pledged the proceeds from one night of each of their revivals to the home. This money funded the construction of an administration building in 1899, and in 1901, leaders dedicated the new building and the remainder of the orphanage at an official ceremony. When the Vaughns left the home in 1905, the debt-free institution resided upon 28 acres of land supported by a 173-acre farm on the Bosque River.
The orphanage continued to thrive and develop over the next several decades. New directors changed the home’s fundraising methods, inviting Methodists to contribute to the welfare of the orphans year-round. Individuals’s contributions soon became the largest form of support for the orphanage. Decreased funding brought by the Great Depression hit the orphanage hard. To make ends meet, director W. F. Barnett cut staff and used his own salary to fund the institution. The economic hardship eased some in 1934 when philanthropist Joe J. Perkins became a large donor to the home after meeting several of the children residing there.
During the early twentieth century, the Mulkeys’ support allowed the orphanage to construct additional buildings, such as a dining hall and a few dormitories, to meet the needs of the growing orphanage. Dr. Hubert Johnson later changed from the dormitory model to provide a more homelike atmosphere for the children residing at the orphanage. Between 1938 and 1952, small numbers of children were moved into cottage-style homes under the care of a houseparent. Around this same time, the children began to attend local schools such as Waco High and A. J. Moore High School, rather than classes taught at the Methodist Orphanage.
The home’s role shifted with the new social trends of the 1950s. More children were arriving at the home due to divorce, mental illness, or physical abuse than as orphans, and the staff and organization of the home evolved to meet these needs. It was in this period that the institution’s name changed one final time to the Methodist Children’s Home. The facility became increasingly known for developing programs for foster-home placement and family rehabilitation. In 1971, the home established a ranch ten miles east of Waco for troubled teenage boys to build a solid foundation for their lives through education and leadership opportunities.
The Methodist Children’s Home celebrated its centennial in 1990, having sheltered more than seventeen thousand children in Central Texas in its long and storied history.
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