The rapid rise of migrant labor in Texas in the 1940s brought large numbers of laborers to Waco. To accommodate this new situation, the city of Waco acquired funds to build the Waco Farm Labor Camp, a center where workers could stay and receive aid while following the crops. Although the camp was only in operation for about twenty years, it had a long-lasting impact on the Waco community.

The Bracero Program, a program through which American farmers in need of laborers could hire Mexican workers in need of a job, began in 1942 due to a decrease in available American farm labor caused by World War II. Although Texas was initially excluded from this program due to its history of discrimination against Mexican immigrants, the “Bracero Ban” was lifted in 1946, and Texas became one of the first stops workers would make as they followed work across the United States.

Waco quickly became a hub for migrant workers because of its cotton crops. As more and more workers came into Waco, the McLennan County Farm Bureau, the Texas Employment Commission, Texas Agri-Life Extension, and the Waco Chamber of Commerce came together to provide them with resources and a place to stay. The Chamber of Commerce began raising funds in 1946, and the new farm labor center was built by the next harvest season.

Initially, the camp consisted of a large Quonset hut on the corner of 3rd Street and Marlborough (now Bosque) Avenue. It accommodated about 100 workers, providing housing, showers, first aid supplies, and other support. However, due to its frequent use and the number of families that came into town every harvest, the facility was quickly expanded in 1947. Along with the services provided at the camp, volunteer organizations such as Church Women United in Waco worked to supply laborers with food, a nursery, a kindergarten, immunizations, and other services.

Aside from its primary function, the camp also became a home for other farm support services. It housed the McLennan County Farm Bureau’s income tax office and often hosted 4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America) events and livestock shows. It also served as a meeting place, where local farmers could come to recruit laborers and workers could come when they needed a job.

The center was renovated and expanded in 1957. It grew to accommodate up to 400 workers in a season. It continued to be a hub for agricultural activity in Waco until the 1960s. In 1964, the government discontinued the Bracero Program, and Waco no longer needed a labor center. Its use slowly decreased, and the city finally demolished it and built a new health center in its place during Urban Renewal. The site of the labor camp is now home to the Waco-McLennan County Public Health District.

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Seeking to provide refuge to children and families in need, the Evangelia Settlement Home opened in 1908. Established by religious reformers Ethel Dickson and Nell Symes, the home aimed to care for the least of these throughout Waco’s community for nearly a century.

Evangelia Settlement was part of a broader settlement house movement that began in Great Britain and moved to the United States. In the late nineteenth century, white, middle- and upper-class women, often motivated by their Christian faith, began to establish homes for those in low-income areas with few resources. Settlement houses popped up across the country. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established one of the most well-known settlement houses, Hull House, in Chicago, Illinois. As the movement spread across the country in the early twentieth century, an estimated eighteen settlements opened throughout Texas, including in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Waco.

Inspired by a traveling evangelist who spoke in Waco, Dickson and Symes opened a small nursery on Webster Street. Initially a modest room located on Thirteenth Street, Waco’s Evangelia Settlement began as a humble effort to care for children whose mothers worked as sewing machine operators at Slayden-Kirskey Woolen Mills. Seeking to expand Evangelia’s reach as a charitable, educational, and religious institution, the founders partnered with Protestant churches in the area to garner community support and to secure funding.

By 1910, with financial aid from local churches, volunteers for Evangelia Settlement began working from a rental house. The next year, additional donations from Waco citizens enabled the opening of Evangelia’s own home, complete with a playground and five full-time staff. The State of Texas issued a charter for Evangelia Settlement Home in June 1912. Though backed by the state government, Evangelia’s board members and volunteers continued to depend on community support.

Donations and funding from those across Waco provided necessary aid for the growing settlement house. An upper floor and additional rooms were added to Evangelia in the late 1910s, and the Karem Shrine constructed a building for boys and a space for kindergarten classes in 1927. The Waco Community Chest, organized in 1924, regularly allocated money to Evangelia, and other generous donors also helped improve the building. For instance, donations from the Cooper Foundation, United Way, and the Andrew J. Dossett family facilitated the construction of a cottage for infants. Later in 1953, Evangelia operated with financial support from the United Fund of Waco and continued to improve the building on site. With each expansion, Evangelia Settlement grew in capacity and provided additional children with housing, meals, and educational and religious instruction.

In partnership with the Salvation Army and the YMCA, Evangelia joined the “Yes-For-Youth” Building Fund Campaign in 1956. The fund enabled the construction of a new building, which opened in June 1958. From 510 South Twelfth Street, Evangelia volunteers and workers continued their efforts to serve children and families throughout the community. By the late 1950s, Evangelia was authorized to care for sixty-two children and offered twenty-four-hour day care. To subsidize costs, parents paid on an individual basis, and the price of care depended on each family’s financial situation. Some children stayed for free, while others paid around five dollars a week per child. For those who placed their children in twenty-four-hour care, Evangelia sought to provide parental education so that children could eventually return home. Still, depending on the family’s circumstances, others were placed in foster homes and at times, orphanages.

Hoping to accept the growing number of interested families, Evangelia continued to expand throughout the mid-twentieth century. Despite Evangelia’s broad efforts, though, the institution remained segregated from its founding until the mid-1960s and only offered resources to white parents and children. Other organizations, including the Joyce Stamps Nursery and the Latin American Neighborhood Center provided care for Black and Latino children in the area.

By the 1970s, Evangelia offered services to over one hundred children and continued to partner with community organizations to ensure children received necessary care. Evangelia held kindergarten classes for children not yet enrolled in school, and for those who attended Waco Public Schools, Evangelia provided after-school care to assist working parents. The settlement house worked with social workers, public school teachers, nurses, doctors, and psychologists. Providing resources to children and families in need remained central to Evangelia’s efforts.

Evangelia Settlement continued to operate in Waco until the state denied their licensure in 2007. After advocacy from Buck Cole, whose family found refuge at Evangelia Settlement in the mid-twentieth century, the Texas Historical Commission placed a marker at the site in 2022. While the settlement house no longer exists in its original form, the site now accommodates EOAC Head Start, an organization that provides educational opportunities and childcare to families across McLennan and Fall Counties. Other organizations in Waco also heed the message of communal care that Evangelia promoted. The Good Neighbor House, founded in 2016, draws on the settlement house movement as its volunteers and workers aim to provide resources and enrichment for Waco’s youth. Through these organizations, Evangelia Settlement’s effort to support under resourced children and families endures.

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Mission Waco has been a cornerstone of the Waco community for decades. Even before the official creation of Mission Waco, founders Jimmy and Janet Dorrell worked hard to make a difference in the impoverished neighborhood of North Waco.

After originally meeting while working at the Waco State Home when Janet was a Baylor student, the Dorrells found their way back to Waco in 1978. They purchased a large, dilapidated house in North Waco with the express purpose of living among those they planned to serve. They began slowly fixing up the home and getting to know those in the community. Beyond the weekly kid and teen clubs they set up, the couple also worked closely with the Campfire organization and Reconcilers Fellowship of Waco.

The Dorrells’ initial incursion into Waco outreach lasted only a year, as they moved to Houston in 1979 for a few years so Jimmy could study under a local pastor experimenting with the idea of cell churches, or smaller home churches, to help spread the gospel throughout large communities. From there they traveled with their firstborn around the world for three months on an exposure trip, learning about poverty and struggle around the world. Upon their return to the United States, as Janet was pregnant with the couple’s second child, they moved back into their home in North Waco with a deeper understanding of poverty and all the more eager to serve those around them. They continued their grassroots community outreach and urban missions for a little less than a decade.

It was not until 1991 that the Dorrells saw the need to form an official nonprofit to support and expand their neighborhood ministry, and they founded Cross Culture Experiences Inc (CCE). The initial intent of this organization was to get middle-class Americans out of their comfort zone and plugged into service and mission work. This goal birthed some of the Dorrells’ first national and international ventures, Poverty Simulation, and “exposure trips.” Poverty Simulation is designed to give people a taste of what it is like to be homeless. Participants sleep in the backyard of a Mission Waco building, find food around town with no money, and much more. The exposure trips were designed to give Americans a window into poverty beyond what they could see in their own towns, true third-world poverty. The Dorrells also continued their neighborhood ministry and Bible clubs while launching CCE. That same year, the Christian Missions Concerns (CMC) Foundation saw the good work the Dorrells were doing in Waco and beyond and decided to fund a new program under the Dorrells’ leadership, Mission Waco. The new program exploded and was quickly brought under the CCE umbrella with continued support by the CMC. Every year since then the Dorrells have launched new projects and learned how to meet the needs of the Waco community in diverse ways.

In the next couple years, Mission Waco made some big moves in the neighborhood. First, the Dorrells purchased an old carpet store next to their home and made it the home base for Poverty Simulation. But the most significant purchase came when they bought the entire shopping center on North Fifteenth Street and Colcord Avenue (on map below). The shopping center was notoriously seedy, housing four low-end bars and a pornographic theater, the Capri. Mission Waco completely renovated the center and began using it for job training, GED. classes, and more. The Dorrells also turned the Capri into a children’s theater and meeting place for the community. Named Jubilee Center, it runs programs like Urban Expression and Prelude Gloria, visual arts and classical music programs for kids. The center even houses a twenty-eight-foot rock climbing wall as well. The building next to the shopping center then became the Youth Center and is a hangout for high-risk and at-risk youth to play video games, pool, and foosball; lift weights; and even hop into the later-added recording studio and let their voice be heard. The initial renovations earned Mission Waco the 1994 “Audrey Nelson Community Development” award, one of five awarded each year nationally. In the coming decade the center would become home to the main offices of Mission Waco and the Mission Waco World Cup Café and Fair Trade Market, located at the intersection of Fifteenth Street and Colcord Avenue. The café and market not only support artisans around the world through fair trade and train locals in food service, they bring middle- and upper-class people into the area and spread awareness of poverty in Waco. By 2000 the Dorrells also founded the Waco Community Development Corporation to bring similar economic development to the area and help provide affordable housing like the Mission Waco-owned Ark Apartments.

The mid-nineties also saw the arrival of Church Under the Bridge and Friday Morning Breakfast. It all started as a Bible study with five homeless men, and Jimmy would also take these men to breakfast on Friday morning. The Bible study grew quickly, as those who were not comfortable within the walls of a church felt accepted in this group of peers. It eventually grew so large that Mission Waco named the gathering Church Under the Bridge, and it met every Sunday morning under the I-35 overpass. When the group grew too large for Jimmy to accommodate for breakfast, First Lutheran Church stepped in and started the official Friday Morning Breakfast gathering at their church, run by volunteers. Church Under the Bridge too became its own entity separate from Mission Waco and now boasts a congregation of three hundred people. This work with the homeless and impoverished shed light on the problems of drugs and alcohol addictions among the homeless population and led to the founding of Mission Waco’s Manna House, an alcohol and drug recovery home, and the Lighthouse, a transition home for those coming out of Manna House. Mission Waco would later found a homeless shelter of its own, My Brother’s Keeper, but not until a decade later in 2004.

Another monumental addition for Mission Waco came in 2005 with the opening of the Meyer Center for Urban Ministries. Mission Waco calls the Meyer Center its “one-stop-shop for the poor and marginalized.” Funded by the Paul and Jane Meyer Family Foundation, this center in downtown offers showers, laundry, clothing vouchers and shelter vouchers, along with a computer lab, job training, and job search aid. The clothing and shelter vouchers can be redeemed at My Brother’s Keeper and Mission Waco’s voucher center, where people can exchange vouchers for free clothes. Mission Waco also runs The Clothesline, selling donated clothes to support other Mission Waco ventures, and it shares a building with the voucher center. In 2011 the Meyer Center also added mental health and relapse prevention services with the help of the Baylor University psychology department. The Meyer Center would later open a chapel for weddings and events in 2013 to help pay for its other services.

In 2012, Mission Waco adopted the name Mission Waco Mission World to better reflect the organization’s work. On top of the many programs Mission Waco operates in the local community, it also still works with partners in Haiti, Mexico City, and India. Mission Waco also continues to take groups to these locations on exposure trips to serve the local populations.

A very important addition to Mission Waco’s ventures was the Jubilee Food Market in 2016. Operating within a known “food desert,” meaning no grocery store existed within walking distance of the neighborhood, Mission Waco wanted to provide low-income families with fresh and healthy foods. Produce is grown behind the store as part of the Urban R.E.A.P. program, allowing the store to sell fresh vegetables at a low price.

In 2018, Jimmy Dorrell passed the executive director position on to John Calaway, but Jimmy remains president. Mission Waco has undeniably changed the face of the city and helped thousands of its residents. Its facets and programs extend beyond those mentioned here, and it continues to provide every service possible to break the cycles of poverty and empower those in need.

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According to founding Junior League member Margaret Barclay Megarity, mid-twentieth-century service opportunities for young women in Waco were limited to society luncheons and church-sponsored activities primarily run by older women. Frustrated and desiring to organize more public service avenues, Megarity invited nine women to her home on December 12, 1935, to discuss creating a new organization.

The fruits of that first gathering were almost immediately tangible. Thirty women attended the first official meeting of the Junior Service League of Waco on January 1, 1936. These founding members drew up a constitution for an organization meant to provide young women with a better understanding of their community, its needs, and its problems. Within one month of drawing up the constitution, the organization began its work in the community.

Children have long served as the focus of the service organization. The first function of the Junior Service League raised $36 (equivalent to nearly $615 in contemporary currency) to provide children’s shoes for Waco’s needy families. In the near century of service which followed, the organization pursued projects such as establishing a children’s symphony, providing resources for clients of Child Protective Services caseworkers, volunteering in children’s hospitals, and providing a playground in Cameron Park.

Though certainly proud of the projects accomplished by the league, leaders often spoke of the organization’s goal as being centered upon training volunteers to become active members in their community. In 1946, the Waco service group incorporated with the Association of Junior Leagues International, becoming the Junior League of Waco. From this time forward, new provisional members underwent an intensive, year-long course in community volunteer service. As early as 1959, the course consisted of two main parts: a history of the Leagues of America, and a history of Waco. The first portion consisted of lectures on the history of the leagues and working in Fort House, the Volunteer Service Bureau, and the Strecker Museum. The second half of the course consisted of lectures on Waco’s background and development, as well as on welfare and public health. Provisional members also toured the city, visiting school administrations, city commissioner meetings, and school board meetings. Information and skills gained from these training measures allowed members to serve the community in the most effective manner.

Despite its focus upon children, the Junior League remained involved in other aspects of the Waco community, as well. In 1956, the group purchased and restored Fort House, one of the historic homes dating back to the Civil War. The organization ultimately decided to turn the deed over to the Waco Society for Historic Preservation (later Historic Waco Foundation) after realizing the home’s historic value. The Junior League later purchased and restored another home, the Clifton House. Today, this historic house (noted on the Waco History map) continues to serve as the Waco chapter’s base of operations.

The reach of the Junior League’s programs is vast. Over decades of service, the group has aided numerous organizations throughout Waco such as the Advocacy Center for Crime Victims and Children, Mission Waco, the Waco Independent School District, the Waco Hippodrome, Compassion Ministries, and many others. Today, the Junior League continues to serve the local community through its dedication to providing well-trained volunteers desiring to work for the good of the community. 

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