Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This Spring 1998 Classic explores the history of Waco Creek that lays in the middle of campus.
The oldest records always call it Waco Creek, doubtless for the ill-fated Waco Indians who once camped along the Brazos between Baylor University and Cameron Park. It rises in what is now West Waco and meanders—when it runs at all—southward to the Baylor campus, where it empties unceremoniously into the Brazos River.
Today, it is rarely more than a trickle, fed by the hissing of a thousand summer garden hoses. Oh, occasionally, it will tumble out of its bed, as it did most recently in May 1989, lapping at the very steps of Baylor’s new book store.
But through most of its history, it has been a placid little stream. Two of Waco’s earliest founders, Shapley and Catherine Ross, lived on its banks. Catherine built a nifty home—not a log cabin—on its banks while her husband was away in 1858.
Shortly thereafter Kate Ross (one of the Ross’s nine children) established Waco’s first social organization, The Possum Club, with the express purpose of possum hunting on horseback along Waco Creek.
Waco grew up around Waco Creek, even after the city determinedly turned its back on the Brazos.
When Waco University and Baylor University were merged, it was obvious that the new school would need more room. Gen. T. J. Speight’s original tract, where the heart of the school was eventually to be centered, was bounded by Speight Avenue on the south and Waco Creek on the north. Other early purchases, from the Greer and West families, also list Waco Creek as at least one of their boundaries. All purchases were completed by April 1886.
Soon after, a group of professors, staff members, and students, accompanied by Baylor President Rufus Burleson, traveled up from Independence to tour the new grounds in Waco. A charming account in the Texas Baptist reported the success of the visit: “. . .the students in groups or pairs wandered over the grassy lawns, admired the laughing waters of the beautiful stream, and enjoyed the pure air. All rejoiced that the city of Waco had given them such beautiful grounds for exercise, promenades, picnics, and San Jacinto celebrations.”
In time, Waco Creek inadvertently became an unofficial dividing line for campus itself. On one side stood the women’s dorms—Memorial, Alexander-Dawson, and Collins. On the other, the men’s dorms stood—Kokernot, Martin, and Brooks. As a result, some older grads say that the bridges provided the lone place where the twain could meet—without incurring the stern stares of the dorm mothers or even the sterner stares of Governor Pat Neff.
The deep creek bed has always been more impressive than Waco Creek itself. As a result, from Baylor’s earliest days, various wooden bridges have been used to connect one bank with the other. One of the first bridges to cross the creek wasn’t actually constructed on the Baylor campus—at least not as it was defined in 1888. Trains headed for the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway’s Waco depot approached the depot from the south on tracks that ran parallel to First Street. As they passed through the ramshackle neighborhood that framed the tracks from South Fourth to the Brazos River, the trains would slow at a trestle bridge that spanned Waco Creek. For generations of train-riding Baylor students, it was the last bridge before campus—and home.
The railway eventually passed into the hands of the Southern Pacific, but the neighborhood degenerated further—and eventually became a prime candidate for the sweeping Urban Renewal legislation of the 1960s. When Baylor purchased the land, it purchased the old bridge as well.
Though the last train clickety-clacked over the trestle in February 1968, the bridge still stands as the oldest over Waco Creek. Later repaved with a concrete deck and siderails, it has become a footbridge between the parking lot of the Fine Arts and Music buildings and the intramural grounds—to be used mainly during the Homecoming bonfire festivities.
The old railway trestle bridge is too far away from the campus mainstream for many traditions to have grown up around it. Other Waco Creek crossings haven’t been so fortunate—or unfortunate. Excess Baylor male testosterone has focused on the bridges over South Eighth Street by the home ec building, a wooden bridge over South Seventh Street, a smaller footbridge connecting the old power plant and Brooks Hall, and the bridge that once spanned the creek between the Student Union and the new book store complex.
According to former journalism professor Harry Marsh, nothing inflamed Baylor men in the 1930s and ‘40s like the bridge near Brooks Hall, a decrepit wooden bridge that was eventually razed in 1945 (the wood was saved and used in the first post-war Homecoming bonfire) and later replaced with the present concrete structure.
The boys promptly turned their attention to the Seventh Street bridge, a fragile iron arch with a wooden floor that swayed dangerously when cars crossed it.
In a Baylor Line account in 1975, Marsh reprinted a report filed by long-time (and apparently long-suffering) campus security officer M. F. Carson to Dr. Roy J. McKnight that detailed a long night of mischief in 1952. On October 3, a mob of Baylor boys committed themselves to an evening of arson, property damage, vandalism, and gratuitous statue abuse:
“I . . . saw the Seventh and Connor bridge on fire. Whoever set it on fire started it underneath on the north end. They used oil and gasoline. I don’t know just how much damage, but it is unsafe to travel and the Fire Department blocked it off. A tree near the bridge also caught fire. It started about 10:15.
“Most of all the boys from Kokernot and Brooks were carrying on something terrible. The city police cars came, also the night captain. The boys let the air out of two tires on one of the police cars and one tire on each of the others. I caught the boy letting the air out of the car of the night captain. . . .
“A group of boys tore one of the iron banister railings off the side of the bridge. They carried it up to Alexander hall and tried to break the front door in with it. Some of the boys were in their shorts . . . The boys cut the fire hose in two places while the firemen were trying to put out the fire. The police had to use tear gas on them. . . .”
According to Marsh, that luckless bridge was soon removed as well.
In time, the bridges became the target of numerous NoZe Brotherhood pranks as well. One of the first—if not the first—record of the NoZe painting the Seventh Street bridge was reported in the Tribune-Herald on February 25, 1963, when three NoZes showed up at the newspaper’s offices sporting pink and blue paint splatters and proudly reporting of their latest “service to the city.”
Subsequent paintings re-paintings of the bridge were uneventful until 1965 when two paint-covered NoZemen (including one who worked as a police dispatcher) were caught in an inebriated condition, nailing a toilet to the bridge. When Dean of Students W. C. Perry went to one of the students’ apartments, he found thirty years worth of Elm Mott street signs that had been “liberated” by the Brotherhood. The NoZe went underground shortly thereafter, although the Brotherhood legend has it that a subsequent attempt to burn one of the bridges (the bridge ultimately burned down or exploded—accounts vary) led to the first expulsion of the NoZe from campus.
Most of the time, little Waco Creek burbled happily along, even if it was never particularly scenic. Retired English professor Clement T. Goode remembers that it never ran more than a trickle in the late fifties and early sixties: “Moss used to grow on the banks, and it was always pretty scummy unless we’d had a good rain.”
Still, Waco Creek was always a flood threat. One particularly severe flood in 1913 washed out the bridge over South Fifth Street near the campus and is well-recorded in the Texas Collections photograph files.
“It had a tendency to get blocked up by debris,” Department of Religion Chairman Glenn Hilburn recalls. “And once, when it was almost completely barricaded, the flood waters reached almost to Franklin Avenue.”
Joe Bartosch, retired manager of architectural services and a treasure trove of Baylor trivia, said the highest he ever saw Waco Creek was when the water rose almost up to Brooks Hall.
“One year—and I can’t tell you the exact year—water came up to Collier’s Lumber Yard, which was by the railroad about Twentieth Street and Franklin,” Bartosch recalled. “They lost two-thirds of their lumber—most of which passed through the campus.
“But the worst thing was that it flooded an old coffin company, which sent dozens of coffins barreling through the campus! They tried to collect them, but most were ruined. I ended up with one of the lids, but no one would take it. I eventually gave it to my son to use on Halloween.”
The next major Waco Creek flood came in 1957 and was watched by former (although hardly retired) Baylor Geology Department professor O. T. Hayward. In fact, Hayward said, where the Sid Richardson building now stands was under at least three feet of water.
But even moderate rains would send Waco Creek flooding into Minglewood Bowl or out of its banks on its sweeping curve behind Rena Marrs McLean Gymnasium, the old tennis courts, and the back of the original law school building (where you could stand on the roof and look straight down into the creek bed).
In 1962, most of the water formerly carried by Waco Creek was diverted through the new fifteen-block-long Clay Street storm sewer.
As a result, Baylor at last decided to work with the City of Waco to do something about the problem. In April 1963, the creekbed was straightened and 1,200 feet worth of concrete tunnels were unceremoniously plopped into an enormous trench that cut straight across the campus, from near the bear pits on Fifth Street to a spot near what would become Russell Gymnasium.
According to the Waco Tribune-Herald, the tunnel was part of a “master plan to facilitate free traffic in constructing new buildings east of the present campus.”
The newly rerouted creek channel carried water beneath Fourth and Third streets and was part of Baylor’s $500,000 service center on South Third, according to Neill Morris, then director of the Baylor physical plant.
At least one environmental organization objected to the plan to re-route Waco Creek and sent it under the campus, but the project was completed without incident within a few weeks in May 1963.
(That fall, incidentally, the construction of Interstate 35 forever split Baylor from downtown Waco. Along with the removal of the old Air Force ROTC barracks, the Armstrong house, and the Baylor Apartments at Cleveland and Fourth, the buildings of the elevated highway provided a natural barrier dam to Waco Creek—keeping any future high flood water on the campus!)
Bartosch said there were numerous water management and beautification reasons for the re-channeling, but it had one immediate positive result:
“It was nice because it cut down the mosquito problem we used to have by more than 50 percent. Before they straightened it out and put the concrete bottom on the creekbed, the mosquitos were so thick you couldn’t walk along the bank during the summer!”
At the completion of the work in 1963, Morris pronounced the possibility of an overflow of Waco Creek between Fifth and Eighth streets as “very slight.” It appeared that the “laughing waters” would laugh no more.
Later, a second facelift of Waco Creek in September 1978 saw the installation of the planters and round stepping stones in the now-concrete creek bed between Eighth and Fifth Streets.
The new, more serene setting did little to dissuade the NoZe, who began hosting their “Unrush” activities at 11:17 past milk at the tunnel entrance next to the “Stink Pits.” Unrushees were herded down the frightening tunnel system, only to ungracefully emerge at the end of the tunnel where Waco Creek forms a tiny waterfall into its old creek bed—several feet below.
The spectacular Waco Creek flood of May 1989 proved that Morris was a better physical manager than flood prognosticator. At the time, it was called a “hundred-year flood.” Apartment complexes, restaurant, hotels, and Baylor buildings all up and down the creekbed north of Interstate 35 were damaged in the worst flooding since 1957.
But Hayward and other members of the Baylor Geology Department simply shook their collective heads and valiantly refrained from saying “I told you so.”
“A drainage system is naturally wonderfully in balance,” Hayward mused. But when he come along with artificial controls, changing the configuration of a stream, we almost always spread the scope of any flood waters.”
Hayward said that the “hundred-year flood” was only accompanied by a “seventeen-year rain”:
“Therefore, it was only a seventeen-year flood. That means it will happen again and again with increasing frequency. Why? Because much of the natural basin of the creek is now covered by concrete and asphalt and the run-off is higher—and faster. The volume of water hitting the creek bed is higher and the rate at which it hits the creek is faster. The result is an increased time of concentration.”
Waco Creek has its origins in a broad, fan-shaped area that spreads from near Waco’s Heart o’ Texas Coliseum over to Valley Mills Drive. What was originally prairie and mesquite grove is now paved parking lots, roads, houses, and buildings. Rain water that once soaked into the ground is now run-off that is funneled lickety split towards the Brazos.
Other problems:
- The diversion under Clay Street features steel bars at the entrance to prevent trees and trash from clogging the diversion tunnel. But after a period of heavy rain, those bars usually collect trees and trash and block it—diverting water back towards the Baylor campus.
- The shape of the Waco Creek tunnel under the campus promotes expanded flooding. The creek bed is wider and higher than the top of the concrete tunnel and the concrete culvert itself is smaller at the top than at the bottom. This automatically creates a dam to upstream flow. The water then does the only thing that it can do—it spreads across the campus.
- The Clay Avenue diversion tunnel’s spillway into the Brazos is at a 90-degree angle. And when the Brazos is high, its more powerful current acts as a dam to the weaker Waco Creek current. (It should have been pointed downstream so that the Brazo’s current would have the effect of drawing the water out.)
“I don’t know how you can successfully put a creek underground,” Hayward said. “The Baylor tunnel only means that this floodway has a roof on it—meaning that Baylor is terribly limited as to what it can accomplish when the creek floods.”
“There are a limited number of things you can do to a drainage basin,” Hayward said. “But the general rule is. Any action you take to modify a drainage system invariably screws it up.”
All of these factors make it probable that some day, with the right inundation of rain, little old Waco Creek could just have the last laugh—again.
