Arlington · Tarrant County · Private · Official site
Texas campuses and the stories they hold.
About the campus
Few Texas campuses have a backstory like this one. Before it was a Baptist school, this hilltop along the old Bankhead Highway was Top O' Hill Terrace, a tea room turned illegal casino that drew high rollers from Dallas and Fort Worth until a 1947 raid began its decline. In 1956 the Bible Baptist Seminary, founded by the fiery Fort Worth preacher J. Frank Norris, bought the property and moved here, and the school that grew from it now calls its past a redemption story. This short walk visits the gate and guardhouse, the former tea room, the terraced tea garden, and the founder's statue. The university offers guided tours of the tunnel and casino rooms by appointment.
About this site
Arlington Baptist University is a private college or university in Arlington, Tarrant County. It is one of 10 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Tarrant County.
The site sits at 32.7362, -97.1566 near Arlington. The nearest cataloged historic site is Top O' Hill Terrace (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum and Hall of Fame, Harrison Cemetery, and J. D. Hollis Cemetery.
History
Arlington Baptist University began in 1939 as the Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute, organized within the movement led by fundamentalist pastor J. Frank Norris, with 16 students meeting upstairs at the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth and Louis Entzminger as its first teacher. Renamed Bible Baptist Seminary in 1945, it was caught up in a split among Norris's followers that led many pastors to form the rival Baptist Bible Fellowship in 1950. After Norris died in 1952, the school left his church and relocated to Arlington (sources differ on the exact year), and in 1956 it bought the hilltop property there that had been Top O' Hill Terrace, a tea room turned illegal casino and speakeasy that Texas Rangers raided repeatedly before it closed. Norris, a vocal critic of gambling, is said to have vowed that his movement would one day own the site. As Arlington Baptist College, the school earned accreditation from the Association for Biblical Higher Education in 1981 and became Arlington Baptist University on June 1, 2017. Its campus still keeps the casino's sandstone guardhouse, iron gate, tea garden and escape tunnels, which visitors can see by appointment.
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