Willie Durham House, an extraordinary person, devoted public servant, and gifted administrator, played a pivotal role in the establishment of two of Waco’s most essential institutions — free public schools and the Waco-McLennan County Library.

Born in 1856 in Austin County, Willie Durham was the only child of Dr. and Mrs. M.S. Durham. When the Durham family moved to Brenham, she attended schools there until her marriage at age 16 to J.A. House. The couple had one child, a daughter, Lolabel.

Whether J.A. died or deserted the family is unknown, but with a young, precocious daughter to support, Willie entered one of the few fields open to women in those days: teaching. Possessed with a great thirst for knowledge, House, in 1878, somehow cobbled together the resources to enroll in the University of Nashville’s Peabody Normal School which had been established to empower teachers.

Upon graduation, the Texas State Board of Education hired House to administer Summer Normal Services (meaning all education and administrative services that go on during the summer months) in Mineola, Victoria, Marshall, and Lampasas. She returned briefly to the classroom in Tyler, then the fledgling Waco public school district hired her in 1884 as the principal of the city’s third ward school. She was just 28 years old. Within a few years, House became vice president and secretary of the Texas State Teacher’s Association, founded in 1880 to further the cause of education in Texas.

From this point forward, House’s name appears hundreds of times in the Waco newspapers, including The Day, The News-Tribune and others — she’s everywhere, speaking, encouraging, raising money for schools, spearheading the campaign for women to vote and working with businessman Isaac A. Goldstein to bring a Carnegie Library to Waco.

When A.A. McGregor was elected superintendent by the School Committee of the Waco City Council, he vigorously crusaded for public schools — Black and white — continually going to the press and city council meetings to push for better salaries, facilities, and working conditions for teachers and administrators. The city council eventually fired McGregor in 1888. Her fellow teachers and administrators strongly supported House for the position. The Council, however, wanted another male superintendent.

On June 3, 1888, Waco newspaper The Day reports that the Council was reluctant to support House’s appointment because she was a woman. We don’t know what changed the Council’s mind, but on July 13, a follow-up article appears, heralding her election to the position and commending her on her qualifications for the role.

House immediately set to work in the Waco schools — improving record-keeping, tackling maintenance issues, expanding the curriculum, and encouraging and equipping students, staff, and faculty alike in a school district that was one of the largest in Texas. She was also the lowest paid superintendent of schools in Texas, making about $2,000 a year, while many other superintendents made closer to $2500.

It was too good to last. When the City Council deeded authority over public schools to the newly formed Waco School Commissioners in 1893, House was summarily replaced and demoted to campus principal. Leading the charge against House was Waco businessman Edward Rotan, who headed up an opposition “ticket.” House returned again to the classroom.

Within a year, the all-male school board declared that only men could be principals in Waco schools. The following year, it decreed that all female teachers must be single and that, should they marry, it would be a declaration of resignation from Waco schools.

In 1904, when the beautiful Carnegie Library opened on Twelfth Street and Austin Avenue, House accepted a position as Waco’s first full-time librarian.

Once again, House encountered opposition, this time from the Waco City Council. Despite the city’s pledges of support with the original grant application, the Council provided minimal support to the library, publicly dismissing it as a playground for children and a storehouse of cheap novels. Consequently, House was again forced to spend much of her time fundraising.

Eventually, she had had enough.

In 1907, House accepted a position with the filing and stenographic division of the Workman’s Compensation Commission in Brooklyn and rapidly rose through the ranks to the position of “chief” of the division. A Waco Times-Herald article from June 7, 1914, reported that her promotion was to “the most important position held by a woman in business circles of New York state.”

When House died in July 1926 at the age of 69, her obituary appeared in both The Brooklyn Eagle and New York Times, as well as different Waco newspapers. Her daughter Lolabel House Hall, Ph.D., an educator respected in both the Waco and New York school systems, brought her mother’s remains to Waco for burial in Oakwood Cemetery and read from a framed letter of tribute from the very commissioners that once fired her, calling her a “remarkable woman.”

When Lolabel herself died in May 1946 after a lifetime of advocating on behalf of education and women’s rights, The Waco Tribune-Herald cited both women in an accompanying editorial:

With her mother, the late Mrs. Willie Durham House, a strong personality well-remembered by old-timers, Mrs. House was one of the early workers for women’s suffrage. It is due to the activity of those two women and many other like them that women are able to vote in this country. We accept the fact of women’s votes without question now. It is hard to imagine the campaign that had to be waged by women like Dr. [Lolabel] Hall and Mrs. House to make that fact come to pass.

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In the late nineteenth century, Waco became known as the “Athens of Texas” due to the several colleges and classical schools, eight newspapers, and scores of well-known politicians and writers located there. Despite this reputation for quality education, the city did not have a public library. Recognizing this deficiency, Isaac A. Goldstein joined with Willie Durham House, the first female head of schools in Waco, to form a library association of concerned residents desiring to establish a privately run library. Though there was much debate over the location, Waco’s first library eventually settled in a free room at Central High School.

The library moved to its own building on North Eighth Street in 1900. As more and more of the Waco community became interested in the library, space became an issue. Goldstein convinced philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to provide $30,000 in the form of a Carnegie grant, on the condition that the City of Waco agreed to pledge no less than $3,000 per year for the upkeep and maintenance of the library. The city agreed to the terms, and on November 28, 1904, the Carnegie Library, located at the intersection of Austin Avenue and Twelfth Street, opened to the public.

In his speech at the opening of the library, Goldstein hailed the building a “classical Temple” in which the “the noblest examples of the world’s greatest and wisest men and women” were enshrined. He declared the library ready to serve its purpose of assisting Waco’s teachers and guiding Waco’s children, bringing all of Waco “closer together for the highest and best purposes of pure and enlightened citizenship.”

In 1923, the River Street Branch of the library opened at Moore High School to serve African American citizens. In 1929, a fire destroyed the entire school, including the library. In 1937, an anonymous donor provided a building on North Sixth Street in order to establish a permanent library branch to replace the one in Moore High, becoming known as the Wheatley Branch of the library in 1939.

Interest in library activities lagged until 1934 because of the Great Depression, and though it picked up once again in the years following, the library was short on space. In 1941, Frederick Schumacher donated the William Waldo Cameron residence, at 1717 Austin Avenue, to the Waco Library Association on the stipulation that the building be used for at least twenty years as a library. After extensive renovations to the Cameron residence, the library was relocated.

The library’s offerings had expanded considerably by 1950 to include services such as microfilm newspapers and books in Braille. In 1950, the Cooper Foundation made a donation for the creation of a Bookmobile. The Bookmobile served as a mobile library, traveling throughout Waco to places such as schools, nursing homes, apartment complexes, and the county jail.

In the late 1950s, the Waco Public Library yet again struggled with space. The only place left to store books in the Cameron House was the basement, which routinely flooded whenever heavy rains hit Waco. Also, the structure of the building had begun to weaken, making it clear that the Cameron House would not last to the end of the Schumacher agreement. In 1960 the Waco Library Association handed control of the library completely over to the City of Waco, and in 1962, the city established a new building at Eighteenth Street and Austin Avenue. In 1965, the Waco Public Library merged with the McLennan County Library.

Before Isaac Goldstein and the Waco Library Association argued for the creation of a public library, education in Waco was available only to those who could afford it. Through its continuous service to the public, the Waco Public Library made the education of the “Athens of Texas” accessible to all citizens, fulfilling Goldstein’s dream of uniting the community through knowledge. Today, this legacy is carried on through the four branches of the Waco-McLennan County Library.

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