Editor’s note: Add-Ran appears both with and without the hyphen in
various historical texts. We chose to follow Colby Hall’s version and
include the hyphen.

The “frightful havoc” of the fire in the Main Building on TCU’s Waco campus in 1910 was undoubtedly the darkest moment in the 37 years since the school was established in Thorp Spring in 1873 by East Texas brothers Addison and Randolph Clark.

The Clarks were preacher-scholars and products of the Cambellite movement, spiritual predecessors of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). They were strong advocates of education, and after the Civil War they began teaching classes to young men and women in 1868 on a site in downtown Fort Worth where the First Christian Church now stands. In 1869, the brothers took over a local private school and re-named it the Male and Female Seminary of Fort Worth. The following year, their father Joseph Clark bought a plot of land near the site of the present convention center on which to build a school.

Unfortunately, the area he chose was soon to be called “Hell’s Half Acre” because of the growing number of saloons, gambling halls and brothels that arrived with word that the railroad would be coming to Fort Worth. The Clarks feared that the proximity of such vices and rough characters staggering into town would be too damaging an influence on the students.

So Randolph found a more suitable location 40 miles southwest in Thorp Spring. Bucolic and quiet, it gave the school room to grow. The Thorp family constructed a spacious building and offered it, and several acres of land, to the Clarks for $9,000. The brothers accepted and in September 1873 Add-Ran Male and Female Academy opened with 13 students. There was no date for late registration, and the first session closed with an enrollment of 75. The Clarks obtained a charter from the state the next spring, and the school officially became Add-Ran Male and Female College.

After its first decade, the school’s student body numbered 117.

Yet Add-Ran was as pioneering as it was small. As a coeducational institution, it was among the first of its kind west of the Mississippi River and the very first in Texas. At the time, barely 15 percent of college students were female, and almost all of those were schooled in women’s colleges. Colby Hall later called the coeducational school, “a sign of progress,” since practically all schools were for either men or women. “To admit both sexes was a bold adventure.”

As ministers, the brothers were adamant that the school provide an environment where students could study “under Christian influence,” yet they insisted it remain nonsectarian and intellectually open-minded.

According to his memoirs, Addison Clark would not consent to it being called a “Christian college. “If it became Christian,” he wrote, “it would be so by the Christian teachers who taught there and would be known by the fruit of their labors.”

During the first year, however, the Clarks secured the endorsement of a convention of delegates from the congregations of the Christian Church in Texas, and every member of the faculty was required to be a member of the Christian Church.

Four years after the move to Thorp Spring, the Clarks struggled to keep up their payments on the property, and “Old Man Thorp” decided to take back his building. But before they were forced to vacate, the Clarks raised $650, bought six and a half acres nearby and began to construct their own building. The money for the first payment came from the sale of the family homes of Addison and Randolph in Fort Worth and the sale of 320 acres that belonged to Randolph’s wife in Collin County.

Even with these sacrifices, the Clarks had money problems, and in 1889 they turned the young college over to the Christian Church. The new charter changed the name to Add-Ran Christian University.

Financial difficulties continued, but in 1895 the executive committee from the Christian Church in Waco submitted a proposal to move the school to Waco. At a considerable discount, they purchased 15 acres of land and the building of the defunct Waco Female College and deeded it over to Add-Ran, along with the promise to contribute up to $5,000 on the construction of another dormitory.

Add-Ran trustees agreed, and on Christmas Day 1895, the school moved from Thorp Spring into what would be called the Main Building.

By the 1902-03 academic year, the school was renamed Texas Christian University. It constructed the Girls’ Home, Townsend Hall and a heating and lighting plant. By the following year, it added a fourth floor to the Main Building.

About the series:
Part I – Spring 2010: The 1910 Fire at the Waco campus
Part II – Fall 2010: A year in downtown Fort Worth
Part III – Fall 2011: TCU settles into present-day campus

On the Web:
A Fateful Fire
The early days: Before the fire
Skiff editor G.W. Stevenson column after the fire
Funny incidents from the fire, recorded in the 1911 Horned Frog
A Century of Partnership

Bibliography
Clark, Randolph. Reminiscences: Biographical and Historical. Lee Clark, Publisher. 1919.
Hall, Colby. History of Texas Christian University: A College of the Cattle Frontier. Texas Christian University Press. 1947.
The Horned Frog. Annual of Texas Christian University. 1911.
The Skiff, a weekly newspaper of Texas Christian University.  March 26, 1910-August 26, 1910.
Swaim, Joan Hewatt. Walking TCU: A Historical Perspective. Texas Christian University Press. 1992.
Waco Semi-Weekly Tribune. Newspaper. March 26, 1910.
Waco Times-Herald. Newspaper. May 11, 1910.