Willie Durham House, an extraordinary person at a time when women were little regarded or valued, played a pivotal, perhaps essential, 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 was the only child of Dr. and Mrs. M.S. Durham. Both of her grandfathers had fought with Gen. Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. When the Durham family moved to Brenham, she attended schools there until her marriage — as was often the case on the frontier — at age 16 to J.A. House. Historian Patricia Ward Wallace notes that virtually nothing is known of J.A., but the couple had 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 a woman in those days: teaching. Possessed with a great thirst for knowledge, in 1878 House somehow cobbled together the resources to enroll in the University of Nashville’s Peabody Normal School which, like other “normal” schools, had been established to empower teachers. Wallace writes that House received “the Peabody Medal” for excellence in every course she took.
Upon graduation, the Texas State Board of Education hired House to administer Summer Normal Services in the small Texas towns of Mineola, Victoria, Marshall and Lampasas. She returned briefly to the classroom in Tyler, then was hired in 1884 by the fledgling Waco public school district as the principal of the city’s third ward school. She was just 28 years old. Within a few years, House was elected as vice president and secretary of the Texas State Teacher’s Association.
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.
Thus begins an intriguing series of articles and letters to the editor in the Waco papers. Her fellow teachers and administrators strongly supported Willie for the position; the Council wanted another male superintendent.
On June 3, 1888, The Day reports, “The Day is informed that the friends of Mrs. Willie D. House have practically abandoned hopes of her appointment to the superintendency of the public schools. The feeling against her appointment — not against her personally — is because she is 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:
There is no manner of doubt that the selection of Mrs. Willie D. House will give satisfaction to a vast majority of the patrons of the public schools. The lady is competent, experienced, reliable. A better selection could not have been made. The Day begs to congratulate Mrs. House upon the compliment paid her. Waco is the only city (of any size, at least) in the state that has a lady as school superintendent and it is an honor to Mrs. House that she is a lady.
House immediately set to work in the Waco schools — improving record-keeping (including salaries and attendance), tackling long-neglected maintenance issues, expanding the curriculum and encouraging and equipping student, staff and faculty alike in a school district that was then larger than Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and Galveston-Houston. She was also, as writer Terri Jo Ryan wryly adds, the lowest paid superintendent of schools in Texas.
Alas, it was too good, too progressive to last. When the City Council deeded authority over public schools to the newly formed Waco School Commissioners, 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.”
In an interview printed in Waco Heritage and History magazine many years later, Rotan recalled: “Mrs. Willie Durham House was the superintendent and a good one. I was a good friend of hers.” But Rotan led the opposition anyway and his slate was elected by a “big majority.”
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 12th Street and Austin Avenue, she was hired as Waco’s first full-time librarian. It was House who had written the original letter to philanthropist Andrew Carnegie requesting funds to build the library.
Once again, House encountered opposition, this time from the Waco City Council, which provided minimal support to the library, publicly dismissing it as a playground for children and a storehouse of cheap novels, despite the City’s pledges of support with the original grant application. Consequently, House was again forced to spend much of her time fundraising.
During her tenure as librarian, Waco newspapers again featured nearly daily accounts of her many activities on behalf of the library, speaking, organizing, encouraging and occasionally imploring Waco civic organizations for their support.
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 is “the most important position held by a woman in business circles of New York state. Congratulations hearty and sincere are being extended Mrs. House.”
She kept her interest in education as well and articles in both New York City and Brooklyn newspapers reported on the annual “Willie Durham House” prize for the most improved student at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Preparatory Country Day School. She was also involved in the founding of the Texas Club of New York City.
House occasionally returned to Waco where her presence was always reported by the newspapers and her accomplishments both in Waco and in New York celebrated. When her daughter Lolabel, already a teacher herself, married University of North Carolina professor Robert Anderson Hall in Brooklyn in 1910, the ceremony was reported extensively in the Waco Tribune-Herald.
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. Lolabel 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 on behalf of education and women’s rights, The Waco Tribune-Herald cited both women in an accompanying editorial:
Waco sends her children out into the world and loses sight of them. The fact of death was not needed to remind her friends in Waco of the work of Dr. Lolabel Hall, but it does call to the attention of those who did not know her that her work was important. 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. Hall and Mrs. House to make that fact come to pass.
