One of the most beautiful buildings on Baylor University’s campus is the Armstrong Browning Library & Museum. Sources such as Campus Grotto and Flavorwire have named the library to their lists of the fifty most beautiful libraries in the United States and in the world, respectively. The three-story Italian renaissance style building houses the world’s largest collection of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning material. Collected by Dr. Andrew Joseph Armstrong throughout his life, the artifacts have resided in the Armstrong Browning Library since its opening in 1951.

Born in 1873 in Louisville, Kentucky, A.J. Armstrong grew up wanting to be a college professor. He lost his father when he was fourteen, so when his mother fell ill a few years later, he delayed his college education to care for her. She died when he was twenty-six, and he began his studies at Wabash College. After he graduated in 1902, he accepted a position teaching English at East Texas Baptist Institute, where he met his future wife, fellow English teacher Mary Maxwell. Armstrong went on to earn his doctorate from University of Pennsylvania in 1908. That same year he accepted an interim teaching position at Baylor University. After three years teaching at Georgetown College, he returned to Baylor as the chair of the English department.

Dr. Armstrong possessed an interest in Robert Browning from an early age. Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, were two of the greatest of the English Victorian poets. A master of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture, Browning was a prolific poet, writing hundreds of poems and eight plays in verse.

Around 1905, Armstrong began to collect Browning's writings. His interest grew greatly upon his meeting the Brownings’ only son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, called Pen, on a visit to Italy in 1909, and he resolved to collect every artifact he could. When Pen died in 1912 without a will, Sotheby’s auction house in London sold off the Browning estate. Armstrong was able to acquire a copy of the sale catalogue, including sale prices and purchasers, from a Sotheby staff member named E.H. Courville. From this starting point, Armstrong began to track down the Browning effects to bolster his fast-growing collection of Browning writings and relics.

Armstrong donated his collection of Browning materials to Baylor in 1918. Throughout his life, he continued to track down Browning artifacts, funding his passion with donations, gifts, and profits from events he hosted on campus. Many of these events were live readings, concerts, or dramatizations, featuring poets, musicians, actors, politicians, and scholars such as Robert Frost, Basil Rathbone, W.B. Yeats, Vachel Lindsay, William Taft, and Katharine Cornell. The university kept the Browning materials in Carroll Library, and designated a Browning Room to house the collection after the 1924 building renovation.

The collection grew quickly, and in 1943 Baylor President Pat Neff provided $100,000 to begin work on a new library to house the artifacts. Dr. Armstrong took upon himself the task of raising the remaining money. With the aid of his wife, Mary, he began an enormous fundraising campaign, writing to alumni, colleagues, politicians, and celebrities for whatever donation they could spare. Each letter he wrote was personal, and each gift was recognized with a thank you note. According to Dr. Armstrong, one person out of every four asked provided a donation. Several local and campus groups with which Dr. Armstrong was involved sponsored specific features of the building. For example, Dr. Armstrong’s Literature Survey class funded the front stairs, and the Tuesday Club of Brady, Texas and Mr. & Mrs. John Leddy-Jones of Dallas donated the Pippa statue on the front lawn.

Five years later, having obtained the $1.75 million dollars necessary for the construction of the building, the university held a groundbreaking ceremony for the new Armstrong Browning Library. In 1950, about halfway through the building’s construction, a second ceremony was held for supporters to place keepsakes such as pictures, books, and papers in the library’s cornerstone along with a list of the 5,117 individuals that contributed to the Browning fund. Finally, in December of 1951, the library officially opened to the public. By now, Dr. Armstrong’s collection was the biggest collection of Browningiana in the world.

The library stands three floors high. Its majestic Italian Renaissance architecture serves as a stunning backdrop for the thousands of artifacts housed within its walls. The Armstrong Browning stained glass collection is the largest collection of secular stained glass in the world, featuring sixty-two stained glass windows depicting the lives and poetry of the Brownings. The ground floor of the library underwent renovation in 1995. Until then, the first floor held offices and classrooms for the English department, while the second and third displayed the various Browning materials. The ground floor now houses the Cox Reception Hall, the ABL Gift Gallery, the Mary Armstrong Seminar Room, the Lewis-Birkhead Lecture Hall, and climate-controlled book stacks. The second floor holds the Martin Entrance Foyer, the Hankamer Treasure Room, the John Leddy-Jones Research Hall, the McLean Foyer of Meditation, and the Cloister of the Clasped Hands, which holds a bronze cast of the hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barett Browning done by artist Harriet Hosmer. The stairwell joining the three floors holds a collection of paintings by Pen Browning. The third floor boasts the Austin Moore-Elizabeth Barrett Browning Salon and the Belew Scholars’ Room (originally Dr. Armstrong’s personal classroom) as well as a balcony overlooking the Foyer of Meditation. Spaces found outside the building include the Garden of Contentment, added in 2012, and an amphitheater.

The Armstrong Browning Library & Museum is a testament to how the tireless effort of one person can accomplish a lofty goal. The library continues to inspire students, scholars, poets, and tourists with its beauty and resources.

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While chiropractic therapy might now seem like a widely accepted treatment for physical ailments, the practice was hotly contested from the time of its emergence in 1895 until the middle of the twentieth century. Waco chiropractor Charles Lemly, who was reportedly arrested sixty-six times between 1915 and 1943 for practicing the controversial chiropractic method, became a lightning rod in debates on the legitimacy of his profession. Lemly would be instrumental in advocating for the acceptance of chiropractic as a legitimate practice, both at the state and local levels.

Charles C. Lemly was born around 1892 in Waco, Texas. The young Lemly was familiar with the medical field from an early age, as his father was a pharmacist. Lemly’s interest in chiropractic as a profession was sparked when he experienced dramatically positive results from chiropractic treatment early in life. When he began his training, however, the chiropractic treatments were relatively new and not widely accepted.

Chiropractic had occupied a controversial space in American medicine and culture since its “discovery” by Daniel David Palter in 1895, when Palmer used spinal manipulation to perform the first “adjustment” to a patient who had lost his hearing. Palmer, a Spiritualist, saw chiropractic as a middle ground between Christian Science and medicine, a metaphysical alternative to traditional religion that incorporated elements of the scientific. While subsequent practitioners did not share Palmer’s brand of spirituality, chiropractic quickly became contested as the medical field professionalized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During this time, national and state medical associations sprung up across the country to ensure the credentials of doctors, and medical practitioners debated the definition, purpose, and nature of medicine. For many, that definition did not include chiropractic. The lack of standing examinations in the chiropractic profession concerned doctors, who questioned the efficacy of chiropractic methods and who worried that chiropractors intended to replace serious medical care with rival, quack treatments. Doctors saw chiropractic as a threat to both public health and individual citizens. Campaigns to discredit chiropractic were coordinated nationally through the American Medical Association and at the state level through the Texas Medical Association.

Chiropractors, however, attempted to establish their practice as legitimate in the eyes of the medical community and the public through the use of scientific terms and the formation of such organizations as the Texas Chiropractic Association (TCA) in 1914. Lemly promptly joined the TCA that same year after his graduation from the Universal Chiropractic College and set up a practice in Waco, Texas, where he lived at 1307 Columbus Avenue with his wife and daughter. From 1930 to 1939, Howard Mann leased East Terrace House in East Waco to Lemly who converted it into the Lemly Chiropractic Psychopathic Sanatorium.

Lemly, like other chiropractors, faced the threat of arrest under the charge of practicing medicine without a license, given that there existed no legally accepted licensing for chiropractors. One of Lemly’s many arrests on the charge of offering unlicensed medical treatment occurred in 1926. During the trial, Lemly’s attorney objected to the prosecution using the term “treatments,” arguing instead that Lemly made a charge for adjustments. The defense argued that there was no testimony to show that he called himself a doctor or had used any medicine. Lemly also appealed to one of his most famous clients, Judge and Baylor University President Pat Neff, declaring, “Mr. Neff is taking adjustments from me now, so he must still believe in us.” Lemly and others argued that it was not their intention to violate the medical laws of Texas, and that they wished for a law to be passed that created a board of examiners to professionalize the chiropractic practice, making licensing a possibility.

In the face of such opposition, chiropractors mobilized in the 1930s and 40s to create associations and lobbying groups that might bring about legislation sanctioning their practices, but divisions within their community over specifics of practice hindered the unity necessary to create legislative change. The Texas State Chiropractic Association provided for the legal defense of its members beginning in 1938. Ultimately, Lemly was instrumental in introducing the first chiropractic licensing bills in the 1930s, which received the support of Pat Neff, who not only received adjustments from Lemly but who defended accused chiropractors as well. But these initial bills did not muster enough support to pass during the 1930s.

In 1943, the first Chiropractic Act of Texas passed. This bill, however, was ruled unconstitutional. It would be six more years before the passing of another bill that proved acceptable to chiropractors and legislators alike. The law stipulated that chiropractors must complete, in addition to chiropractic school, a minimum of two years of college and identified required science courses. In the next session, the chiropractic profession was included by the legislature in the Workers Compensation Act of 1951.

Lemly continued to practice chiropractic throughout the 1960s, by which time the American public had become increasingly open to chiropractic as a legitimate method of addressing physical ills. A lifelong advocate of chiropractic, Lemly published articles to “explain the practice of Modern, scientific Chiropractic, the second largest healing profession in the world.” By the time of Lemly’s death in 1970, chiropractic had, for many, come to carry scientific legitimacy while also constituting a more natural and non-invasive treatment approach to physical ailments.

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For over a century, Baylor University has served as one of the various educational institutions contributing to Waco’s reputation as the “Athens on the Brazos.” Constructed to house the university’s administration, Pat Neff Hall came to serve as a symbol of the university’s legacy and tradition.

Despite the economic uncertainty of the 1930s, enrollment at the nearly century-old Baylor University rapidly continued to increase. The large influx of students under the presidency of former Texas Governor Pat Neff led to overcrowded classrooms and dwindling faculty space. Thus, when the General Education Board, a New York-based philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting higher-education institutions, offered $50,000 for the construction of an administration building to free up classroom space, the university seized the opportunity.

On December 7, 1938, the university held a Masonic cornerstone-laying ceremony to mark the beginning of construction on the new building. The architectural firm Birch D. Easterwood and Son designed a 46,000-square-foot American Georgian-style structure, which cost around $250,000 to complete. Workers finished construction on the building in 1939, although it was not dedicated until February 1, 1940, on Founder’s Day, the day on which the university celebrates its founders and commemorates the anniversary of its charter.

Named for the president who saw the university through a difficult economy which threatened to close the school, the hall features inscriptions on all sides favored by Pat Neff. The east and west halls bear two quotes from scripture, including the passage form Proverbs advising that “wisdom is better than rubies.” A line under the eaves just above the third floor notes “the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity,” a quote from Benjamin Disraeli that Neff once used a chapel speech. As noted by retired Baylor professor Robert Reid, the building came to reflect not only Neff’s tremendous passion for the importance of education, but also the hope of the founders of the university to establish a center of learning for “all ages to come.”

One of the building’s most distinctive features today is its gold roof which can be seen from various points throughout the city. Yet the roof was originally stainless steel, and remained so for many years. At the time of its construction, it was only the second stainless steel roof in the entire nation. The university added gold leafing in 2000.

Within the tower lies another famous aspect of Pat Neff Hall: the carillon. In December of 1939, the set of twenty-five chimes donated by trustee Thomas Cullen rang out across campus for the first time with the hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” The bells inevitably wore out and in 1988 were replaced by the current forty-eight-bell carillon donated by Regent Emeritus Drayton McLane. The new bells were constructed in France and, after a shipping mishap which sent them to Mexico was remedied, were dedicated on November 4, 1988.

In addition to fulfilling its main function of housing the office of the president and other administrative officials, Pat Neff Hall has come to serve as a center of Baylor tradition. The practice of lighting the hall up with green lights following an athletic win began in 1978 and continues today. Perhaps the most widely recognized use of the hall is its prominent placement on the university institutional mark. Used for all official communication purposes, the symbol featuring Pat Neff Hall serves as a testament to the university’s legacy, tradition, and commitment to education.

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