Page 18 - Waxahachie, TX Residential Design Guidelines

IntroductIon

Although commercial activity increased, the local economy
remained largely agricultural. The primary crops grown, according
to the agricultural schedules of the 1850 and 1860 censuses, were
wheat, oats, corn, and sweet potatoes. Cattle raising was also
an important livelihood among the original settlers. Cotton, which
would later become the foundation of the town’s late‐nineteenth‐
and early‐twentieth‐century prosperity, was grown only in small
quantities during this early period. The 1860 Agricultural Schedule
reveals only 389 bales of cotton were produced in Ellis County.
While the fertile land was ideal for cotton cultivation, few people
realized its potential during the antebellum period because of the
difficulty and expense of shipping the crop combined with the lack
of a sufficient labor force. Before the Civil War, Waxahachie had
several schools and four churches.

The vast majority of Anglo American settlers who arrived in
Waxahachie and Ellis County relocated from other parts of the
United States. The 1850 and 1860 census records reveal that
most of these new residents originally hailed from the Upland
South. Many of the new residents who came from the South
brought enslaved people with them, swelling the county’s enslaved
population to 1,104; a 10‐fold increase from 10 years earlier.

The Civil War drained Waxahachie of human and capital
resources, and growth came to a standstill. With the war’s
conclusion, however, Waxahachie experienced renewed economic
prosperity and expansion. The Northwest Texas Conference of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, South, established Marvin College in
1868 – a district school that “became a designated church college
in 1870.” The Thirteenth Texas Legislature incorporated the college
in 1873, and “high school and college courses were taught in
geology, military science, chemistry, and telegraphy” to over 700
students by 1883. The courthouse square flourished with activity,
and a steady influx of new settlers began to immigrate to the area.
As new settlers moved to Waxahachie, the town’s economic base
became more diversified. In 1867, Frank Templeton started the
Argus, the town’s first newspaper, which was bought by H. H.
Sneed and renamed the Democrat in 1870. By 1881, the town had
an additional newspaper – E. C. Huckabee’s The Mirror.

The 1870s and early 1880s marked a transitional period in
Waxahachie’s development. The town grew from a small village to
a bustling commercial, governmental, and agricultural center in the
north‐central Texas region. The population increased from 1,354 in
1870 to 3,076 in 1880 to 4,500 in 1887.

10 Waxahac hie Residential design guidelines