The Waco Founder and the Bluff Above the Springs
Near Waco, Texas
The first permanent structure in what became Waco went up in March of eighteen forty-nine. Shapley Prince Ross built it on a bluff overlooking a cluster of springs where the land met the Brazos River. He described it as a double-log cabin on high ground, positioned to see upstream and downstream both.
Ross is credited as the town's founder. George B. Erath, a former Texas Ranger who had helped survey much of central Texas, designed the first city block that same year and named the settlement after the Native people who had previously occupied it.
That was a common practice of the era, naming the town for the displaced, and it left the Waco tribe's name permanently attached to a place they no longer inhabited. The springs that made the bluff attractive are largely underground now, covered by a century and a half of development, but they were real and reliable and made this bend in the Brazos a natural stopping point. Travelers and traders had been pausing here long before the Anglo settlers arrived.
The Waco people built their village here for the same reason Ross chose the bluff: fresh water, elevated ground, and a clear view of who was coming. By the time Baylor University arrived in the eighteen eighties and the Cotton Palace opened in eighteen ninety-four, the double-log cabin was long gone and the city had grown past fourteen thousand people. Ross's bluff had become a downtown.
