Rebecca Pines Shelton Sparks, often referred to as Mother Sparks, was a laywoman from Missouri who moved to Texas with her family before the Civil War. Sparks married a Confederate veteran of the Texas Calvary and a Texas Ranger, Thaddeus Pinckney Sparks, and the Sparkses moved to McLennan County in the 1870s. There, Thaddeus Sparks accumulated wealth as a saddle-maker, and secretary of the Waco Improvement Company and First National Bank. Towards the turn of the century, Waco was booming with industrial business in which men such as Thaddeus Sparks prospered, and a growing number of women wanted a chance to be a part of it. The Waco workforce took a turn as women left rural areas because of poor crop yields and low cotton prices and moved to the big city to pursue new opportunities as businesswomen.
Because of her great enthusiasm for missionary work through the Methodist Church, Sparks used her skills and family money for the greater good. Most women who moved to the city were inexperienced, received a small salary, and could not pay the rent for higher-priced boardinghouses, so Sparks stepped in to meet that need. In 1900, Sparks established a cooperative home for middle-class working women in Waco at 1118 Franklin Avenue. Sponsored by the Methodist Mission Federation, the Rebecca Sparks Co-operative Home’s mission was to provide women with safe, chaperoned surroundings that allowed them to comfortably transition into the workforce. Students of Baylor University also stayed under the roof.
Local citizens furnished the rooms of the house and rules allowed twenty-four residents to stay under the roof at one time. Residents paid thirty-six cents per day and were required to clean their living spaces in order to stay in the cooperative home. The tenants shared spaces and socialized in a common area that included a piano, record player, games, and reading materials. The young women grew close and spent time together making candy, sewing, sharing magazines, and hosting parties in which they could invite their friends. All activities took place under the supervision of a deaconess of the Methodist church.
Mismatched chairs and impersonal decorations filled the home, suggesting that the house had an atmosphere formed by a variety of people rather than a single family. Over the years, furniture became shabby from use, repairs needed to be made, and furnishes of the house needed to be touched up to provide the residents with comfort and to ease their minds from the workday. Methodist women of Waco held fundraisers in the form of country fairs to raise funds to update the home.
The Methodist Church sponsored the cooperative home, and even though girls were not required to be a part of the Methodist denomination, religious training was an emphasis of the home’s mission and a requirement of the residents. Religious leaders adorned the mantle in the common room to remind tenants that Sparks’s home was a Christian one. Every girl attended church and Sunday school, led prayers before meals, and took turns leading evening prayer services known as Vespers. These communal activities led the women of the house to live together harmoniously.
Sparks fell ill in 1919 and passed away in 1920, and the home was renamed the Rebecca Sparks Inn. The cooperative home continued to provide a space for working women sixteen years after Sparks’s death. The facility closed in 1936, and the home’s lumber was taken for the construction of Rebecca Sparks Memorial Methodist Church in Bellmead, Texas, to honor Sparks, who provided a haven for countless young women who called the place home.
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]]>The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad Company began its corporate existence in the days following the Civil War and was intended to funnel business from Kansas City and points north and east to a new rail route being cut across Indian Territory and through Texas. The Katy, touted in advertisements as the "Gateway to Texas," breached the Lone Star State's frontier near the site of present-day Denison, where the first regular train arrived on Christmas Day, 1872.
The Katy eventually expanded operations in Texas and reached Waco in the 1880s, establishing a depot in the 300 block of South Eighth Street (as indicated on the Waco History map). M-K-T came to recognize Waco’s importance as a central location upon the 268 miles of track, and in 1910, established a roundhouse in a rural area north of the city. As businesses opened to provide goods and services for workers for the rail company, a city grew up around the roundhouse which today is known as Bellmead.
One of the most infamous publicity stunts of all time, The Crash at Crush, took place about fifteen miles north of Waco, featuring two M-K-T locomotives intentionally set on a head-on collision course on September 15, 1896. Advertised for months in advance, the event drew more than forty thousand spectators to an event which ended tragically in three deaths and dozens of injuries. The Katy settled all claims with cash and lifetime passes. William George Crush—vice president of the railroad and disciple of P. T. Barnum—was "fired" the evening of the crash, but rehired the following day. Rumor even had it he got a bonus for all the attention he brought the railroad, which curiously saw a surge in business afterwards. He worked for the company for fifty-seven years until his retirement.
Despite the catastrophe of The Crash at Crush, the Katy prospered into the first half of the twentieth century. At one point in 1912, the M-K-T owned more than 1,600 miles of operated track in Texas. Passengers luxuriated aboard the Texas Special, the Bluebonnet, and the Katy Flyer. In 1931, even in the middle of the Great Depression, the company owned 82 locomotives and 1,000 cars and reported passenger earnings of $1.7 million and freight earnings of more than $8 million. Wheat rolled in from Missouri and Kansas, and oil flowed out of Texas.
But after the boom years of World War II, the railroad began a long slide into oblivion. New transportation options like air travel and freeway systems took their toll on the once-prosperous line. In 1964, the 99-year-old company that had brought Midwestern wheat south and sent "Texas tea" (oil) north had fallen onto hard times and dropped the passenger trade to concentrate its resources on freight. On January 26, 1964, dozens of people crowded aboard for one last historic jaunt of steel and steam.
Despite cost-cutting measures, mergers, and consolidations, the Katy's fortunes continued to decline. In 1967 it reported a net loss of more than $10 million. Even a $19 million government guaranteed loan in 1976 to repair deteriorating track ties could not stop the railroad’s declining fortunes. In 1988, the Interstate Commerce Commission gave Union Pacific and its subsidiary, the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company, permission to buy the Katy. On December 1, 1989, the two companies merged and the Missouri-Kansas-Texas was no more.
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