College & University

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

Fort Worth · Tarrant County · Private · Official site

Texas campuses and the stories they hold.

About the campus

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary grew out of Baylor's theology department and was chartered in 1908 under founding president B. H. Carroll. Fort Worth won a statewide contest for the school by offering a hilltop south of town plus $100,000, and classes began here in 1910. The original campus was laid out as a 30-acre square on Seminary Hill, and a 1972 state historical marker tells its story. This walk starts at that plaque and the domed Memorial Building, then visits the seminary's three oldest buildings, its library, a quiet prayer garden, and a 3,500-seat chapel.

About this site

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is a private college or university in Fort Worth, Tarrant County. It is one of 10 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Tarrant County.

The site sits at 32.6845, -97.3452 near Fort Worth. The nearest cataloged historic site is Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include University United Methodist Church, Travis Avenue Baptist Church, and Brite Divinity School.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
History

Southwestern Seminary traces its lineage to 1901, when Baylor University in Waco created a theological department under the Baptist preacher and scholar B. H. Carroll, who by 1905 had built it into the Baylor Theological Seminary. Carroll then pressed for full independence, and the State of Texas chartered Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as a separate institution on March 14, 1908, with Carroll as its first president. Classes continued in Waco until 1910, when the trustees accepted a Fort Worth offer of a building site and construction money; the hilltop tract south of downtown came to be called Seminary Hill. Its first structure, Fort Worth Hall, took the city's name, and religious-education and gospel-music departments started in 1915 later became separate schools within the seminary. Ownership passed from the Baptist General Convention of Texas to the Southern Baptist Convention in the mid-1920s, and the seminary's funding came largely through the denomination's Cooperative Program. By the late 20th century it enrolled thousands of students from dozens of countries, and in the 1990s and 2000s it became a focal point of the Southern Baptist conservative resurgence, including the contested 1994 dismissal of president Russell Dilday. Today the campus, whose B. H. Carroll Memorial Building and its rotunda are a signature landmark, trains ministers, missionaries and church musicians and also operates an undergraduate college and a degree program inside a Texas state prison.

Sources: en.wikipedia.orgtshaonline.org

📍 32.6845, -97.3452 · Fort Worth, Tarrant County
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