To say that Nellie and Miriam Buck were Baylor and Waco’s answer to Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan is to over-state the fact – but just barely. Few people of any era have overcome more and achieved more than the indomitable Buck sisters.
Civil War veteran and lawyer Giddings Judson Buck and his with Mary C. Halbert moved to Waco in 1867 and were blessed with children Ermine F. (born in 1866), Miriam O., (1868), Raymond (1870), Mary D. (1872, who died as an infant), Giddings J. Jr. (1877), Oliver H. (1879), Nellie Faulkner Buck (October 17, 1881), and Harrison D. (1887).
(Mary Halbert, incidentally, was first cousin of the Rev. W.B. Bagby, the first Protestant missionary to Brazil, and the namesake of Bagby Street near Baylor.)
But Nellie was born without use of her hands and arms, which hung stiffly at her side. None of the many articles on Nellie suggest a cause or reason for the condition and, more importantly, throughout her life Nellie herself steadfastly refused to be limited by it.
Miriam, 13 years Nellie’s senior, attended Baylor, graduated in 1886, and in 1900 accepted a position as an assistant in the Preparatory Department upon graduation. But when Nellie was admitted in 1899, Miriam became her constant companion.
Miriam (left) and Nellie Buck (right). | Photos courtesy of the Texas Collection at Baylor University
Nellie and Miriam’s presence on the small, close-knit Baylor campus appears to have been accepted as the norm and they apparently made friends easily. Pictures and stories of Nellie appear in the 1902 and 1903 Baylor Round Ups. She was awarded the Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1903.
On September 26, 1903, The Lariat reported that “Nellie is now at Yale after a pleasant summer with her mother and sister in Chicago, Niagara Falls and the Massachusetts Bay.” Even her new address – Yale Station, New Haven – was included. At Yale, Nellie was accompanied by Miriam, who resigned from Baylor to attend graduate classes with her. Later Lariat articles detail the letters that the two sisters wrote to friends back at Baylor about their experiences in New Haven.
Back in Waco in 1904, Miriam returned to Baylor and accepted a position as a faculty member of the English Department, where she taught for 22 years.
Nellie, not surprisingly, had a heart for students facing physical challenges and other obstacles and in the fall of 1904, when a friend approached her to privately tutor a girl whom Waco schools wouldn’t accept, she agreed:
Someone came to me and asked me if I would teach her niece. The woman was living on the edge of town and the niece had come to live with her after the girl’s father died. The superintendent of schools then was strict on not letting anyone come to public school who didn’t live in the city limits. I didn’t know if I could teach or not but I told the woman I’d take her niece.
Soon the parents of other children with a wide variety of physical challenges, who had missed significant class time because of illness or other reasons, or who had needs the public schools couldn’t satisfy, brought their children to the new private school in Nellie’s home, which she named “Waco Academy.”
Within a few years, Waco Academy ran advertisements in both The Lariat and different Waco newspapers: “For tutoring, see Miss Nellie Buck, 1824 South Ninth Street. Old Phone: 1889.” Another Lariat article, from October 1, 1914, notes that “Miss Nellie Buck, Baylor ’03, conducts in South Waco a growing private school.”
Miriam joined the Baylor Round Table shortly after joining the Baylor faculty and both The Lariat and Waco newspapers regularly reported on Miriam and her guest Nellie’s presentations to the organization. In April 1918, at a Round Table luncheon on Russian drama, Nellie presented a paper on different Russian authors.
But later that year in August, both Miriam and Nellie left Waco for Washington D.C., where they had accepted “excellent” positions in the federal government, according to The Lariat. The article also reported that the sisters had “presented to the University their splendid library, which was most carefully selected.” The gift included The Historians’ History of the World, Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition), an edition of Poe’s works, a translation of Hugo’s works, Plutarch’s Lives and a number of college textbooks.
The August 8 edition of The Lariat reported on a “very beautiful entertainment” farewell party for Miriam and Nellie hosted by their friends at Seventh & James Baptist Church “who gave heartfelt expression of the love and honor in which these estimable women are held.”
Alas, there is no mention of where the Bucks worked or in what capacity, much less any stories about their life and adventures in post-World War I Washington D.C.
The inseparable sisters returned to Waco in 1921, where Miriam and Nellie resumed their work as co-principals with the Waco Academy on South Eighth Street, offering classes for intermediate and grammar pupils to a first class of 40 students. “I’ll worry about a building and you worry about the affiliation,” Miriam told Nellie upon their return. The sisters soon got both, in part because Baylor had recently discontinued its own high school academy and a population surge in McLennan County meant that Waco High School could no longer accommodate all students.
The Bucks’ return prompted a full-time article in The Lariat on December 10, 1921, headlined, “Former Baylorite Now Head of Waco Academy.” Miriam told reporter Faye D. Kirkpatrick that she had enjoyed her 22 years teaching at Baylor, save for the “monotonous grading of papers.” “Every teacher, after he or she had taught for a given length of time,” Miriam said, “reaches a stage where they must either get out or be put out. I chose the former; I did not want to teach a stage where I would not progress.”
Waco Academy initially met in the Buck’s “cozy home” at 515 N. 17th St., with separate rooms for the instruction of English, mathematics, sewing, history, and a study hall. Nellie assumed the instruction of all language classes, while Miriam taught all English and history classes. The motto of the school was reported to be “Thoroughness” with the slogan of “Prepare for College.”
“Of course, we cannot exert too much influence over our students,” Miriam told Kirkpatrick, “but we just can’t help from influence in every possible way for Baylor. Baylor seems to be a part of us.”
For the next 30 years, Nellie and Miriam Buck’s Waco Academy became a beloved institution in the city, even as it attracted increasingly larger classes and more instructors. When the first building became overcrowded, the sisters bought and re-modeled the home their parents had built at 1824 S. Ninth St. in 1925.
One longtime teacher at Waco Academy, Elizabeth Kindness Hughston, had graduated in the first class of the recently organized Waco Public School System in 1882 and joined the faculty of Waco Academy in her later years. Hughston, who died in February 1949, had taught cowboys in Abilene in her youth. Nannie Tynes Bailey faithfully taught at the school into her 80s.
Another teacher, Nannie Bailey, said that the school, which by now had moved to much larger quarters on North 17th, enjoyed so much success because of Miss Nellie and her tireless work ethic:
Nobody knows the good Miss Nellie has done. Many men got their start and impulse to directing their lives through Miss Nellie. Professional people entered their business because of the inspiration they received from the school and the advice they received from Miss Nellie. Many men were called to the ministry under the influence of Miss Nellie.
Miss Nellie took students who were practically failures in public school, taught them and now they have made good businessmen.
“I never asked anyone to come,” Nellie said in a later interview. “They were sent by the Lord to me.”
One question that puzzled several reporters through the years was how that Nellie, born without working arms and hands, “handled” teen-age boys. “I was used to boys because I had four brothers and I practically raised my nephews who lived next door,” she told journalist Jane Walker. According to Walker, Nellie would “reprimand the boys in her classes by flipping her handicapped hands against them.” The boys would laugh, “but they would usually obey.”
Throughout her long career, Nellie said that she preferred teaching high school students. “I didn’t care about teaching beginners because the youngster needs someone all the time,” she told Walker.
Neither Miriam nor Nellie ever married.
Miriam and Nellie’s headstones at Oakwood Cemetery. | Photo by Robert F. Darden
Miriam died at home on April 21, 1951, at the age of 83. With Miriam’s passing, Nellie closed Waco Academy but continued to take private students in her home. In October 1958, she broke her hip while on a field trip with her students to the Waco Water Works. While in the hospital, she reluctantly decided to close her beloved school.
She quickly negotiated the sale of Waco Academy and its property at the intersection of the 500 block of North 17th Street at Fort Avenue to a developer, who built what would become the Haven Manor Nursing Home. Nellie and her lifelong friend Nannie Bailey were among the first residents when it opened on March 1, 1960.
When Nellie Faulkner Buck died in Haven Manor on January 9, 1964, it was front page news. She was 82. Nellie was buried next to Miriam and other members of her family in the tree-shaded Block 2 of Oakwood Cemetery
Of the remarkable Miriam and Nellie Buck, the legendary Baptist minister and longtime pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, once called them “Two of Texas’ grand, noble useful teachers. What a pity Texas has not more like them and their fine school.”
That said, we know precious little about either sister. At a time when women were denied or afforded only minimal education, Miriam and Nellie achieved advanced degrees despite the physical challenges that faced Nellie every day of her life. How did she feed herself? Read a book? Comb her hair… or any of the other thousand routines of daily life we take for granted?
Nor do we know what drove her, though the epitaph on her gravestone may give us a clue: “So shall I have courage.”
And what of Miriam? Who, like Anne Sullivan to Helen Keller, selflessly devoted her life to another? Again, at least part of the answer may lie in Oakwood Cemetery. Miriam’s simple tombstone reads, “She lives in others.”
Nellie’s sweet-spirited obituary in the January-February 1964 issue of The Baylor Line doesn’t credit the author, but it reads like it was written by one of the untold number of lives that Nellie impacted in a very real way: “She was hailed for years for her exemplary courage, as she cheerfully and helpfully made her own place in the life of the city and in the hearts of hundreds of Central Texans.
