which was accomplished by the efforts chiefly of citizens of Waco and Hamilton.
With our pleasant neighbors of Hillsboro and Temple and the intervening suburbs, and a railroad running from Beaumont on the southeast to Brownwood on the northwest, we may be able to forget. That this prospective road will be assured in the next two years we are certain and it will be mainly due to the efforts of educating public sentiment by the Waco Times-Herald. We have three live, well edited papers — the above, the new Waco Morning News and The Waco Semi-Weekly Tribune. Editor A. R. McCollum of The Tribune is not only a pioneer journalist of Waco, but known and loved throughout the state. No weekly journal in the United States is more worthy a place in the home. Few editorials are so readable, of such graceful diction; few are as truly faithful friends and servers of the people of the city, state and nation, as Editor McCollum.
In about 1879 Waco became the terminus of the Cotton Belt road and in the early eighties the Missouri Pacific passed through as far as Taylor — a later extension of what is now the Missouri, Kansas and Texas, provided quick transportation and comfortable travel without change from St. Louis, Mo., to Galveston, Texas. These roads added two more bridges across the Brazos. In more recent years the advent of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass and the International and Great Northern gives Waco nine railway outlets.
Six or seven years ago the County Commissioners of McLennan county and the city authorities of Waco decided that the old bridge was inadequate to the demands and one block above was built the new iron truss bridge at a cost of $100,000. It is a fine substantial bridge and we can travel faster on it. It leads up a magnificent causeway, to our handsome court house, but we still point with pride to our heart's first love — the old suspension bridge.
We not only have the right, but it is a duty to tell its story and give credit to the far-sighted citizens who were instrumental in its building. Of the forty-nine miles of paved streets, electric car lines, additional railway connections, suburban roads, there is net time to speak — our handsome stores, as up-to-date as you will find in any city of a hundred thousand inhabitants; our various manufacturies, chief of which is the large woolen mill, employing some five hundred people; our light and water systems, all speak the Progressive City. Our Auditorium proclaims us the Convention City. Our churches, schools and universities; our Public Library, our Y. M. C. A. suggests a place for the education of children. A biographer could find material for studying the lives of the men who have belonged first to Waco, then to Texas, and in some cases to the nation. These are too numerous to mention, for they are in all walks of life. Without disparagement to others I can not refrain from mentioning a few. I beg to remind you that Waco has furnished two presidents of the greatest educational institutions in Texas — Hon. L. S. Ross to the A. & M. College, and Col. Wm. L. Prather to the University of Texas. Waco has furnished two of the most prominent divines in the United States — Drs. Carroll and King, who after thirty years of pastorate service in the First Baptist and Old School Presbyterian churches, have retired not to inactivity, but to the most responsible institutions
