Long before the Interstate 35 overpass cut the city in two, Avenue H provided the chief entryway into Temple from points south.

Along this important thoroughfare and its parallel sister street, Avenue G, a diverse and vibrant neighborhood sprang up. This area, between Avenue M and the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway tracks to the north, was a working–class neighborhood, a medical district, a religious center and a cultural nucleus at various times - often at the same time - in the city’s history.

If the railroad was the lifeblood of early Temple, then the Avenue G neighborhood was the heart that kept it pumping. It emerged around the turn of the previous century - shortly after the city’s founding in 1881 - to serve, both directly and indirectly, the growing rail yards and the blossoming medical community.

Some neighborhood residents worked at the Santa Fe yards and roundhouse just a few blocks to the north. But even more residents worked for the medical facilities.

Because of Temple’s central location, and its growing importance as a railroad hub, the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway relocated a hospital for its employees from Galveston. The hospital was built in 1891 on South 25th Street, along the neighborhood’s western edge. That structure was replaced in 1908 with a building that still stands, today housing the Scott & White Santa Fe Center.

King’s Daughters Hospital was located in the neighborhood for a brief time. It opened shortly after the Santa Fe Hospital, occupying a building on West Avenue F before moving to South 22nd Street in 1900.

A block off Avenue G between Fifth and Seventh streets was the location for St. Mary’s Catholic Church, convent, school and St. Mary’s Sanitarium, which closed in 1899. After the church and school moved, Dr. Arthur C. Scott and Dr. Raleigh R. White eventually bought the block, establishing their own hospital called Temple Sanitarium in 1904.

Over the next 60 years, Scott & White Hospital grew to encompass 31 buildings spread across 5½ city blocks in the Avenue G and H area. In his book “Healing on the Hill,” local historian Weldon G. Cannon describes the activity that permeated the neighborhood as patients were wheeled through the streets, even in bad weather, from operating rooms in the main hospital building to nearby cottages for recuperation.

Patients came from all across the Southwest. This steady influx of people into the neighborhood attracted a number of small mom–and–pop businesses. Grocery stores, cafes and restaurants, general merchandise stores, pharmacies, laundry services and other service-industry shops appeared in the neighborhood, many in a cluster along West Avenue G in the blocks near South Third Street.

Until Scott & White moved to its present location on South 31st Street in 1963, the energetic neighborhood’s primary focus was the hospitals and the medical community.

There were student nurses’ dorms plus boarding houses where graduate nurses lived, and doctors lived within a couple of blocks of the hospitals.

In the early 1920s businessman Byron O. Beard built a shopping center. Located on Avenue G at South 11th Street, “Beardville” - as it was called by the town’s residents - housed a grocery store, meat market, garage, filling station and lunch stand.

Other early grocery stores in the neighborhood included D. Horton and Co. Grocery at 407 W. Ave. F and R.H. Delancy Grocery at 901 S. 25th St.

Small boarding houses, apartment buildings, hotels and motor courts sprang up in the area.

Residences also attract churches, and several were built in the neighborhood, primarily between Avenue H and Avenue G. The neighborhood housed churches including Memorial Baptist, First Lutheran, German Evangelical, 7th Street Methodist and the 7th and G Church of Christ.

Jones Park was built on donated land between Avenue H and Avenue G east of 25th Street. In later years a U.S. Postal Service substation was located along West Avenue H.

The old interurban trolley, which connected Temple with Belton in the early 1900s, ran through the neighborhood. In his book “The Prairie Queen and Her Choo–Choo Train: It’s About Temple, Texas, and Then Some,” A. Bryant Messer recounts how a group of neighborhood boys would frequently soap the trolley tracks at the point where they started up a small hill toward Avenue G just after crossing the Santa Fe railroad tracks. This would cause the trolley cars to spin their wheels fruitlessly, seeking traction, before coming to a halt.

The mischievous boys - Temple’s version of “Our Gang” and “The Little Rascals” - would meet daily in an open lot along Avenue G, Messer wrote, where they would “box, wrestle, run races, and play baseball and football,” and sometimes step into the street to force the passing streetcars to stop.

In 1911, the Meridian Highway, an auto trail connecting Winnipeg, Canada, to Laredo, was built. The stretch between Waco and Austin ran through Temple. The Meridian Highway, so named because it roughly followed the Sixth Principal Meridian through the heart of North America, later was extended southward to Mexico City, eventually becoming part of the Pan–American Highway. The United States portion was designated U.S. Route 81 in 1926, and in recent years was replaced by Interstate 35.

U.S. Route 81 passed north through Salado, Belton and Midway (a small community between Belton and Temple near present–day Midway Drive) before entering Temple along Avenue H. At South 25th Street it moved one block north to run along Avenue G all the way to South Third Street.

Third Street was the main route through downtown Temple in the early days because of U.S. 81, which continued north along Third Street until Nugent Avenue, where it turned west. At 15th Street it resumed its northward course toward Waco.

Later U.S. 81 bypassed the Avenue G neighborhood and downtown to take a more direct path between Austin and Waco, with traffic traveling along a route that pretty much matches the course of I–35 today. But Avenue H remained the primary entry into Temple from U.S. 81 until the elevated portion of I–35 was built in the 1960s.

Tuesday: How the Avenue G area gradually decayed.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a five-part series on the decline of the Avenue G area and efforts that are under way to rehabilitate it.