Throwback Thursday: Our first home in Houston

Over the last couple of months, BCM Momentum has brought you some amazing photos from the College’s infancy. Today we bring you something a little more current.

This photo, taken 70 years ago, displays the original home to what was then called Baylor University College of Medicine.

Arriving in Houston in the summer of 1943, the College was unable to start construction in the newly formed Texas Medical Center. Due to wartime restrictions on construction goods, the College moved into an old Sears, Roebuck and Co., warehouse temporarily.  The building was located at the corner of Lincoln and Buffalo Drive, more commonly known as the corner of Montrose Boulevard and Allen Parkway today.

The location was close to Houston’s Jefferson Davis Hospital where most of the clinical teaching of students took place.

In the BCM history book “The Quest for Excellence  Baylor College of Medicine, 1900-2000”, Chief Science Editor Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H., describes the scene:

“The dissecting tables for anatomy classes went where the notion counters once stood when the warehouse was actually a store. Lecture rooms were walled off in the furniture department. Where salesmen once measured men for reasonably priced suits, the 15,000 volume medical library would be assembled on shelves that, if placed end-to-end, would measure at least a mile.”

It wasn’t just hired hands doing the heavy lifting. Members of the faculty who made the move from Dallas and members of the Baylor Board of Trustees rolled up their sleeves and helped get the school ready for a July launch.

In the coming weeks we’ll be exploring the College’s victories in education, medical and scientific research, healthcare and community service as we celebrate our 70th anniversary.

–By Audrey M. Marks