Baylor and the Republic of Texas

Baylor University carries a fact most universities cannot claim: it was chartered by a sovereign nation. On February first, eighteen forty-five, the Congress of the Republic of Texas signed the act creating Baylor, making it older than Texas statehood itself. President Anson Jones put his signature on the document nine months before Texas joined the Union.

The school was founded by three Baptist missionaries: Judge R. E. B.

Baylor, for whom it is named; William Milton Tryon; and James Huckins. Sam Houston, not yet a senator or governor but already one of the most famous men on the continent, contributed the first five thousand dollars. The institution opened in the town of Independence, in Washington County, about ninety miles southeast of here.

It thrived there for four decades, becoming in eighteen forty-nine the first institution in Texas, and the second west of the Mississippi, to teach law, and the second west of the Mississippi to grant a degree to a woman, in eighteen fifty-five. Then the railroads came to central Texas and bypassed Independence entirely. Without a rail connection the town began to contract.

In eighteen eighty-five, Baylor merged with Waco University and relocated to this city. The move brought an institution of national ambition to a railroad town on the rise. Waco offered land, financial backing, and a position astride the main lines pushing south from Fort Worth.

Today Baylor enrolls roughly twenty thousand students and remains the largest Baptist university in the world. Its presence remade the city's identity, drawing hospitals, research centers, and a professional class that shaped central Texas for generations. But the founding moment belongs to a nation that no longer exists.