THE METHODIST SCHOOL AT WAXAHACHIE.
I forgot to mention, soon after entering the commission machinery
business, I met a friend by the name of Meeks who was the owner of the
Marvin College property at Waxahachie, established and built up by the
Methodist Church of Texas, and governed by a Board of Trustees who had
permitted the school to go down, after having been in operation for
perhaps two or three years. They borrowed ten thousand dollars in gold
from my friend, Meeks, giving him a first mortgage on the property,
which mortgage he had to close by public sale and had to take the
property for the debt, though the trustees claimed that the property
cost the church about a hundred thousand dollars. The same old mossback
element that persecuted me in my railroad and other business, too, were
largely responsible for the failure of Marvin College and boasted that
it should never succeed again. Mr. Meeks asked me to undertake the sale
of it, which of course could be used only for school purposes, as it was
unfit for anything else. Having received his promise that he would give
me full control of the sale of it, I agreed to take hold of it for a
commission of ten per cent.
I immediately went to work, got out an attractive circular letter,
giving advantages of Waxahachie for an educational point. I soon had
responses, or inquiries from the North and East, and a strong one from a
Presbyterian school man at Lexington, Kentucky, who decided to take hold
of it as soon as he could dispose of his property in Lexington.
Finding that I was about to sell the property to a Presbyterian who did
not expect to make it a denominational school, the trustees of the
Methodist Church, composed of Captain V. G. Veal, Fred Cox and Doctor
Walkup, got busy among their Methodist friends and secured authority to
take the property over again for ten thousand dollars in gold, Meeks
waiving the interest, and paid me a thousand dollars cash and three
thousand dollars in one, two and three years, with a mortgage on the
property. In selling them the property on these liberal terms, I had it
distinctly understood that if they failed to come up with their second
payment I would close them out at once, which I was forced to do.
I soon got into correspondence with General L. M. Lewis, an educator of
high order, then connected with a college in Little Rock, though he had
already been connected with the A. & M. College at Bryan, where the
faculty had a rupture, which resulted in the resignation of the whole
board. I induced General Lewis to visit Waxahachie, where I introduced
him to the Rev. Chas. E. Brown of the Methodist Church, who was one of
the most popular preachers there and he, in turn, got him acquainted
with Fred Cox and Doctor Walkup. These four gentlemen formed a
copartnership and again bought the property and in less than two years
built up a large school with many transient boarders. While on a deal
with General Lewis, I frankly told him that he would have a difficult
task to build up a school in that town on account of the sworn
opposition of the mossback element and that he would have to depend upon
transient patronage altogether for the success of his school when they
began, having no doubt that Waxahachie’s patronage would gradually
follow.
As I predicted, soon after starting the school and having the children
of Mr. John G. Williams, who tried to be the boss of the town, Williams
demanded of General Lewis that he make a change in certain rules and
General Lewis told him that if the rules didn’t suit him he had better
take his children home, which he did and the faculty were not sorry for
it.
The second year of the school, having paid their indebtedness to Meeks,
a demand for an addition became imperative, so they borrowed money and
put up a large one, as also a separate boarding house. After two years
more, the free school system of Texas obtained, thereby cutting down
their patronage to a point that did not justify them to continue and
were finally induced to sell out to the city for a public free school,
which they had to do, at a considerable loss and thus crippled them
financially.