On a Wednesday afternoon in late June, more than two hundred members of the largest incoming freshman class in the history of Baylor University boarded a convoy of chartered buses and headed from the school’s campus, in Waco, to the tiny town of Independence, two hours south on Texas Highway 6. It was in Independence, they would learn, that Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor—a Kentucky native who found God during a revival meeting at the advanced age of 46—helped establish the university, in 1845. The trip was the centerpiece of Baylor Line Camp, a five-day orientation held each summer designed to familiarize the newest Baylor Bears with one another and their school and, not incidentally, to further sell them on the Baylor brand.
Once the students arrived, they were herded into Independence Baptist Church, the oldest continuously operating Baptist church in Texas, where they were regaled by staffers and alumni with a history lesson about the university’s origins—in those early years, extracurricular activities included “dewberrying” and “spirited horse races”—and stories of past Baylor leaders who had “paved the way so that we all could contribute to the narrative of our great university,” as one speaker put it.
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