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. In this November-December 1991 Classic article, Baylor students uncover a former Waco neighborhood thanks to an English professor’s innovative teaching methods.
Students in Dr. Alan Robb’s English 1304 class (“Thinking, Writing, and Research”) discovered more than how to use footnotes and literary citations in a research paper.
They discovered a neighborhood.
Instead of writing papers on literary topics, the students systematically investigated a block of what was once South Third Street, near the present site of Moody Memorial Library.
It’s not the first time Robb has used innovative teaching techniques. Students in his previous 1304 classes have researched virtually every major building in Waco. Not only are the papers a valuable resource to the Texas Collection, but Waco realtors often refer to them as well.
For the five-week summer session last June and July, Robb needed to assign a topic which would be quickly accessible. Kent Keeth, director of the Texas Collection, suggested using the voluminous records from the Waco Urban Renewal projects 1960s.
Waco Urban Renewal spread over a number of years and included several neighborhoods around Baylor University, including South Third Street. The federal government required Urban Renewal to keep exhaustive records of each real estate transaction conducted by the program. While much of property research today would have to be conducted at the McLennan County Records Building, the Urban Renewal files had the advantage of being accessible on campus.
Keeth led the first class session at the Texas Collection. His wide-ranging lecture covered legal descriptions (subdivision name, block number, lot number), past and present City Directory books, abstracts, deed records, probate records, and other sources. He also urged the students to interview people who were relocated from South Third Street by Urban Renewal.
The Baylor that the students discovered during their June research differs greatly from the Baylor of today. The original 1886 campus of twenty-three acres was little changed for many years. Baylor slowly added the land in all directions, Keeth said, until it hit natural barriers at James, Dutton, Fifth, and Eighth streets. But as the college experienced a growth spurt in the 1960s, it was obvious to both Waco and Baylor leaders that the school needed to expand. One obvious direction was from Fourth Street north to the Brazos River.
Keeth said the old Carroll and Lilley subdivisions were originally designed for better-quality homes. But the growth of Texas Textile Mills on LaSalle Avenue eventually contributed to their decline. The City of Waco built its trash incinerator near where the Baylor Marina is now located. Elsewhere, the neighborhood north of Baylor to the Brazos became a jumbled no man’s land of meat rendering plants, often substandard rental housing, and small, sometimes untidy, businesses.
But when Robb’s students regrouped at the Texas Collection on July 1, 1991, their finds about this one block varied greatly. Keeth and Robb arranged them in two rows of chairs facing each other, each student representing his lots’ locations on South Third Street.
The housing the students described, by the time of Urban Renewal in 1960, was remarkably uniform. Using Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, the Urban Renewal reports filed on each property by the appraisers, and some first-person accounts from the original occupants, they discovered a city block of dilapidated wood frame houses, some with no indoor plumbing, few with any insulation, many with barns of chicken coops in the back yard. Some houses had five or six rooms, but most had less. On some small lots there were as many as three residences. Even the smaller homes were subdivided into still smaller rental properties. Rents, even in the early 1960s, ranged from $1 to $7 per month.
Student Benjamin Thole’s lot on 1300 South Third was the lone commercial establishment, a small grocery store built in 1910. Christy Sterter managed to track down original occupants of a house at 1305 South Third. The couple still lives in Waco and — thirty-one years after their relocation — told her they were still angry about Urban Renewal and would not discuss their feelings about being forced to move.
Jenni Fehmel’s research on the next set of lots led her to a similar conclusion.
“Urban renewal was an evil, wicked, underhanded, conniving process,” she said. In Jenni’s opinion, the purchase by the Baylor Waco Foundation (which later sold the lots to Baylor for $1), was “biased from the start.” The occupants of her lots at 1310 South Third disputed the appraiser’s original valuation of $3,000 and won a judgement of $3,958 in court. Others found owners who also had contested the valuations; several won slightly higher payments from the program.
Miss Fehmel also discovered an interesting interlocking series of families that owned much of the property on this block. Family names like Batts, Perkins, and Adams reappear often throughout the records of the various houses.
Students Heather Buchanan and Bryan Rickman found similar situations in their lots. The renters were janitors, truck drivers, maids, and hospital workers living in houses with outhouses and few modern appliances. Urban renewal, they reported, paid renters relocation costs. Some renters moved regularly but usually stayed on South Third Street.
Brad Wallace found that Urban Renewal had been opposed by many members of the African-American community, including the later Rev. M. L. Cooper (a street named in his honor, ironically, is next to where Third Street once extended). Wallace traced ownership of his lots 1313 and 1315 South Third to a Samuel R. Evans in 1868. J. T. Flynn, one of the owners of the Waco Bridge Company, bought it the following year.
Wallace also located the owners of the property, who reluctantly sold their lots in 1960. They too expressed their displeasure over their forced move, although he noted that they still live in the somewhat larger (and nicer) house Urban Renewal found for them across town.
Yvonne Garcia said her lots were also best by “oodles” of legal problems, deed discrepancies, and contested wills. One rental family with seven children rented a tiny four-room house for the princely sum of $1 per month–and were often delinquent. Miss Garcia reported that Waco did not have a suburban housing code until 1957, just as Urban Renewal was getting underway. She also said she was offended by Walstein Smith’s appraisal report, which included photographs of all structures on the property—including outhouses.
“The pictures of the outhouses were disgusting,” she said. “They could have at least shut the door!”
Conversely, Dustin Lau found original residents of his lots at 1329 and 1331 South Third, and both told him they were happy to move. One resident’s new house had indoor plumbing–which she had never had in her home before! Another owner received $4,000, less $460 owed to a woman with a lien on the property.
Emily Sanderson traced her property back to a Mr. W.W. Slaughter in 1872. Later owners included such well-known Waco families as the Parrotts, Sparks, Speights, and Downs. She also discovered another family with seven children and an unemployed father living in six rooms. Some letters from the Urban Renewal process also survive, she said, which indicate that reaction to the program was mixed on South Third Street.
Following the reports, Robb noted that the purpose of English 1304 is to involve students in argumentative writing, persuasive writing, research, and analysis— and that the South Third project provided virtually every component.
Unlike some projects, however, the South Third Street papers required extensive pre-class preparation by Robb and Keeth. Keeth not only shaped the research but also delivered several early lectures to the class and provided a historian’s perspective and analysis.
“In the end, for a trial project, it worked beautifully,” Robb said. “Oh, there will be some cutting and trimming, but it is a perfect topic for a short semester. Certainly it is time-sensitive for the professor, but it is a thoroughly rewarding project. To see students blossom when they are forced to use their brains in a new and unaccustomed manner, that’s good news!”
And the students’ reaction? The members of the class grew so close during their hours of research that they hosted a party at semester’s end in the English Department students’ commons for Robb, Keeth, and the Texas Collection support staff.
One student said, “It’s just like a neighborhood block party!”
And, in a way, it was.
