The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor began in 1845 as the female department of Baylor University at Independence, then moved to Belton in 1886 as Baylor Female College. Fires, a near-bankruptcy and several name changes followed before the school opened fully to men in 1971. This walk circles the historic heart of the Belton campus, where a bell tower built from the ruins of its first hall, the reburied grave of a Republic of Texas judge, and a cluster of state markers tell that story. It finishes with the alumni museum and the Crusaders' football stadium, roughly a mile and a half in all.
About this site
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor is a private college or university in Belton, Bell County. It is one of 2 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Bell County.
The site sits at 31.0662, -97.4642 near Belton. The nearest cataloged historic site is Luther Memorial (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Jeff Hamilton, The Rev. George Washington Baines, and Judge Baylor Grave.
UMHB shares the 1845 Republic of Texas charter that created Baylor University, and its story begins with classes that opened in May 1846 in a small wooden building at Independence in Washington County. In 1851 president Rufus C. Burleson insisted on separating the sexes, leaving the young women as Baylor's Female Department in the original frame building while the men moved to a neighboring hill. In 1886 the Baptist State Convention relocated both schools to Central Texas: the men's side went to Waco, and the women's college reopened in Belton as Baylor Female College on September 13, 1886, in a three-story limestone building on an eleven-acre hilltop donated by the town. Elli Moore Townsend, wife of the president, founded the Cottage Home System in 1893 so that women who could not afford the dormitory could live cheaply by raising food and livestock, an arrangement described as the first work-study program for women at a college west of the Mississippi. Renamed Baylor College for Women in 1925 and admitted to the Southern Association the next year, the school was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by an expensive building program, a disastrous 1929 fire and the Great Depression. A gift from John G. and Mary Hardin saved it, and it became Mary Hardin-Baylor College in 1934 in their honor. The Scott and White nursing school joined in 1968, the college became fully coeducational in 1971, and its first graduate program, a master of education launched in 1978, brought university status and the current name. Today the Belton campus is known for landmarks such as Luther Memorial and W. W. Walton Chapel and competes in NCAA Division III's American Southwest Conference.
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