University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor originated in 1845 in Independence as the Female Department of Baylor University. For the first 133 years it had the distinction of being called the oldest college for women west of the Mississippi. In 1971 it became coeducational. It has never merged with any other college, and continues to operate under its original charter. Baylor University, chartered under the Republic of Texas in 1845, fulfilled the purpose of the Texas Baptist Education Society of the Union Baptist Association to provide Christian education for its sons and daughters. Section six of the charter stipulated a Preparatory Department and a Female Department along with the provisions for the males. For the first six years all students were taught by the same faculty in the same building, although parental preference for separation of the sexes probably was met by scheduling separate classes. In 1851 a step toward the separation of colleges came through the insistence of the second president, Rufus C. Burleson, that the sexes be separated. In 1851 Burleson took the male students to a building on an adjacent hill and left the female students in the old frame building of Independence Academy with Horace Clark as principal. In 1855 the Female Department moved into a stone building built to Clark's design: the tall stone columns of the Female Department building are all of Baylor that stands today in Independence.

In 1866 the Baptist State Convention of Texas severed the Female Department from the university and founded Baylor Female College, which operated under the original charter but was governed by a separate board of trustees. In 1886, because of the changing demography of Texas, the Baptist State Convention of Texas moved both Baylors to Central Texas—the men to Waco, where the school merged with Waco University, and the women to Belton. As inducements to the women's college, the town offered $31,000, an eleven-acre hilltop site, and its united energies to erect a building to be ready in September. On September 13, 1886, President John Hill Luther opened Baylor Female College in the three-story native limestone building and presented his faculty members to a welcoming crowd from Belton and Bell County. By the second year the growth of the student body necessitated enlarging the building to twice its size. The original building contained a dormitory for students and teachers, a dining hall, a library, a chapel, studios, and classrooms. Lack of money delayed necessary construction until 1907, when an administration and classroom building was begun. In 1893 the first of a group of frame cottages was built by Elli Moore Townsend to provide housing for students who could not afford the dormitory. In 1905 a permanent residence hall housed this remarkably early cooperative and self-help movement known as the Cottage Home System, which was built by the residents with some donations from friends and graduates who had lived in the cottages and involved the raising of food and livestock by the residents. The system was an independent venture at first but was deeded to the college in 1916.