Old Baylor's Columns

The four stone columns standing on a hill at Independence are the most photographed thing Baylor University owns, and they are almost always captioned as the remains of Baylor University. That is half right in a way that matters. Baylor was chartered by the Congress of the Republic of Texas on 1 February 1845 and opened at Independence the following year. In 1851 it split into a male department and a female department on two separate hills, the men on Windmill Hill and the women on Academy Hill. The columns stand on Academy Hill. They fronted the female college's academic building, begun in 1855 and completed in 1857, and nothing comparable survives of the men's campus. The state marker at the foot of them puts it bluntly: these columns mark the site of Baylor Female College, and the men attended Baylor University on the hill to the south, across what the students called the River Jordan. In 1886 both halves left. The trustees merged the men's college with Waco University and moved it a hundred and twelve miles north to Waco, where Baylor University still is. The female college went separately to Belton and became, in time, the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. Two universities in two towns, out of one hill village that kept neither. There are two parks at Independence today, one on each hill, and tourism listings conflate them constantly. Since 2006 incoming Baylor students have been brought back to Independence to receive their jerseys at the columns as part of joining the Baylor Line, which means that every year a new class is welcomed under the women's college.