Texas Ranger Hall of Fame: Two Centuries of the Oldest State Police
Near Waco, Texas
On the banks of the Brazos River in Waco stands the official state historical center of the Texas Rangers, a Texas limestone building tucked inside Fort Fisher Park, named for a short-lived eighteen thirty-seven Ranger outpost that preceded the city of Waco itself.
The Texas Rangers claim the title of the oldest state law enforcement agency in North America, and they trace their origin to a single letter. On August fifth, eighteen twenty-three, empresario Stephen F. Austin wrote that he would employ ten men to act as rangers for the common defense, at fifteen dollars a month payable in property. There was no army, no government, just settlers trying to survive on the Texas frontier, and Austin improvising. The formal institution wasn't created until November eighteen thirty-five, when the Texas Provisional Government established three companies of fifty-six men to range and defend the border.
In the nearly two centuries since, the Rangers have been everything the frontier demanded and some things it should not have permitted. They fought Comanche raids and tracked outlaws across the Chihuahuan Desert. They also suppressed labor strikes, enforced Jim Crow, and participated in extra-legal killings along the Rio Grande, a history the museum has begun to address more candidly in recent years.
The museum itself opened in nineteen sixty-eight, authorized by the Texas Public Safety Commission four years earlier. In nineteen seventy-one, the Texas legislature created the Commemorative Commission for the Rangers' one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, and the Hall of Fame wing opened in nineteen seventy-six, dedicated by Governor Dolph Briscoe. Today the collection holds more than fourteen thousand artifacts, silver stars, Bowie knives, wanted posters, and the Winchester rifles that defined an era.
The museum sits adjacent to Interstate Thirty-Five in the heart of Waco, reminding every driver that this stretch of Central Texas was, for generations, the edge of the known world.
