Bosqueville

Bosqueville is four miles northwest of downtown Waco near the intersection of Farm roads 1637 and 3051 in north central McLennan County. Settlement of the area was well underway by the 1850s, and the community may have served as an early voting site. Little Berry White donated ten acres of land for a school and cemetery in 1850. In 1854 the Bosque Academy was established by Cumberland Presbyterian minister John C. Collier. As the community's Methodist population began to grow, that denomination also used the academy's facilities for its gatherings. The school, which eventually added a conservatory of music, by 1860 had 180 students and two institutions: the Bosqueville Academy for Boys and the Seminary for Young Ladies. The school closed when the Civil War began, but was later reorganized as the Bosque College and Seminary, a nonsectarian school that purported to be the country's first coeducational institution. A townsite was laid out in 1858, and the Bosqueville post office was established in April 1860 with Cornellius P. Petit as postmaster. By the mid-1880s Bosqueville had three churches, a general store, and 100 residents. Cotton and wheat were the principal cash crops grown by area farmers. In the 1890s Bosqueville was on a daily stage route between Waco and China Spring. The post office was discontinued in 1907, and mail for the community was routed through Waco. The population of Bosqueville was reported at seventy-five in 1910 and at ninety-four in 1930; it rose to 100 by the late 1940s. Two schools and several scattered houses marked the community on county highway maps in the 1940s. The Bosqueville schools were consolidated with the China Springs rural high school district in 1959; Bosqueville became the focus of an independent school district in 1965. Its population was estimated at seventy-two from the 1970s through the early 1990s. By 2000, however, the population had grown to 200.