Texas Christian University

The campus of Texas Christian University sits about three miles west of downtown Fort Worth, two hundred seventy-two acres of redbrick buildings and live oak trees that represent one of the most unlikely success stories in American higher education.

Addison and Randolph Clark were brothers, young men of deep religious conviction who belonged to the Christian Church, a frontier denomination that stressed simplicity and scripture over hierarchy. In eighteen seventy-three they opened AddRan Male and Female College at Thorp Spring, a tiny community about seventy miles southwest of Fort Worth. Their reasoning for choosing such a remote location was characteristically direct: they wanted to keep their students away from what they called the distractions of the Hell's Half Acre district, the rough saloon quarter that was Fort Worth in the cattle-drive era.

They opened their doors with thirteen students. It was one of the first coeducational institutions west of the Mississippi.

The school moved several times, to Waco in eighteen ninety-five, then to its permanent Fort Worth campus in nineteen ten, changing its name to Texas Christian University in nineteen oh two when it affiliated with the Disciples of Christ denomination. Fort Worth businessmen and civic leaders donated land and money to lure the school, the same civic energy that brought the seminary to the hilltop a few miles away.

TCU's alumni reflect both football glory and broader achievement. Sammy Baugh, perhaps the most influential player in the history of professional football, quarterbacked the Horned Frogs in the mid-nineteen thirties before transforming the passing game in the NFL. Journalist Bob Schieffer, anchor of CBS Evening News and longtime host of Face the Nation, is a TCU graduate. Pro Football Hall of Famer LaDainian Tomlinson ran for more than thirteen thousand yards in the NFL after starting here in Fort Worth.

The university that began with thirteen students in a small-town church college now enrolls more than eleven thousand.