Somebody isn't quite down with their TCU history. By 1910 TCU and Fort Worth were already longtime friends.
The Clarks operated a preparatory school, the Male & Female Seminary of Fort Worth, from 1869-1874. Even as they operated that school, they were also laying plans for a coeducational institution of higher learning in Fort Worth, AddRan Male & Female College. The fact that it was coeducational is notable because in 1870 higher education was mostly a male-only endeavor. In 1870, only 15% of the national college enrollment was female, and most of those were segregated in women’s colleges. TCU was one of the first coeducational institutions of higher education west of the Mississippi River, and the very first in Texas.
The Clarks bought five square blocks of downtown property from 8th to 13th streets between Calhoun and Jones – roughly where the parking lots fronting the Intermodal Transportation Center are today. Unfortunately, this was the same time period in which the Chisholm Trail cattle drives were beginning, which fueled rampant growth of the city’s vice district, Hell’s Half-Acre. The Acre was soon crowding right up to the edge of the Clark property, and they decided this was no place to found a college for young adults. They sold the Fort Worth property and bought a new property with a large stone building on it at Thorp Spring, about 2 miles northwest of Granbury. That is where AddRan College began in 1873. The name was changed to AddRan Christian University in 1889 and Texas Christian University in 1902.
In 1895, the Clarks moved the college to Waco to gain the advantages of a larger population and transportation center, but they were in Waco for only 15 years. In 1910, TCU’s main administration building burned down and the people of Waco made no offer of help toward rebuilding. An organized group of Fort Worth entrepreneurs offered a 50-acre campus and $200,000 (over $5 million in current dollars) to lure TCU back to this city, which was the historic source of its institutional roots anyway.
