Houchen Community Center
El Paso, El Paso County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This center has served El Paso since 1912, though its roots go back to 1893 when Rose Gregory Houchen, a teacher from Michigan, met Margaret Tripp, a member of the Women's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Tripp was a missionary in Segundo Barrio, a Hispanic neighborhood along the U.S.-Mexico border. In 1910, Houchen donated $1,000 to build an institution to help the poor. Completed in 1912 at the corner of Tays and Fifth streets, the Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement House offered English language classes, Bible study, daycare, kindergarten and social gatherings. An influx of immigrants arrived in Segundo Barrio during the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. The poor conditions in which they lived contributed to outbreaks of disease; residents especially suffered during the 1918 flu epidemic. The center began to focus on health care, teaching hygiene, treating illnesses and opening public showers. Soon, the Women's Division of the Methodist Board of Global Ministries purchased a neighboring building, opening Freeman Clinic. In 1937, a building with two wings replaced the clinic, with one wing for Freeman Clinic and the other for Newark Maternity Hospital, which provided pre- and post-natal care as well as delivery for more than 62,000 babies before closing in 1986. The center continued to grow in the following years, adding new programs. Later it was joined by El Buen Pastor Methodist Church (1945) and Houchen Day School (1947) to form a compound known as Friendship Square. In 1988, a gymnasium was built and in 1992, a playground and Head Start building replaced the old settlement house. Today, Houchen Community Center continues to offer many programs to serve and encourage residents of Segundo Barrio. (2007)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Houchen Community Center traces its roots to 1893, when Michigan teacher Rose Gregory Houchen backed missionary work in El Paso's Segundo Barrio, a Hispanic neighborhood on the border. Her 1910 donation built a settlement house that opened in 1912 offering English classes, daycare, and kindergarten. As Mexican Revolution refugees poured in and disease spread, the center pivoted to health care, eventually running the Freeman Clinic and a maternity hospital that delivered more than 62,000 babies.
Why it matters
Houchen exemplifies the Progressive Era settlement-house movement adapted to the borderlands, serving generations of Mexican immigrants with education, health care, and community.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Rose Gregory Houchen
- · Margaret Tripp
Related events
- · Mexican Revolution
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Trinidad Concha
El Paso, TX
Trinidad Concha, the "singing cobbler," shaped El Paso's musical life from the 1890s into the 1930s, blending traditional Mexican folk with contemporary orchestral music. After serving as assistant director of President Porfirio Diaz's touring military band, he deserted while performing in the United States and, unwilling to risk prosecution, settled in El Paso, where he formed Concha's Mexican Concert Band in 1897 — eventually forty players strong. He led a young women's orchestra for a local church, performed at the historic 1909 Taft–Diaz border meeting, and in 1911 serenaded Maderista revolutionaries across the line in Mexico.
El Paso's Syrian-Lebanese Community
El Paso, TX
Between 1880 and 1924, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants — many from Christian Mount Lebanon — left the fading Ottoman Empire for economic opportunity in America, and a notable number entered through Mexico rather than Ellis Island. El Paso became a gateway to the Southwest, and the earliest settlers arrived by the 1890s, clustering along El Paso Street and running grocery and dry-goods stores in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. By 1953 the city counted some 450 Syrian families whose businesses and professions had become woven into its life.
El Paso's Chinese Community
El Paso, TX
Chinese immigrants reached El Paso just as the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in 1881, opening a rooming house and grocery even as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 slammed the door on newcomers nationwide. Those who stayed built the largest Chinese community in Texas, growing produce and running laundries and restaurants while sending earnings home. Later waves came under unusual circumstances—hundreds escorted north by General Pershing during the Mexican Revolution, then refugees from the Great Depression and the Communist victory in China—each generation weaving Chinese life more deeply into the border city.
Concordia Cemetery
El Paso, TX
On land once known as Concordia—home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson, whose wife Juana was laid to rest here in 1856—this ground grew into El Paso's great frontier burial place. By the 1880s townsfolk drove three miles out to inter their dead, and by 1890 the grounds had been parceled into Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit, and other sections, a mosaic of the borderland's peoples. Among the thousands who rest here is the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, alongside pioneers, civic leaders, and war veterans.