History has a way of fading, being obscured, altered, or erased entirely by passage of time, with its destructive winds, rains, fires, and failure of human memory. We tend, therefore, to try to hold precious history by gathering bits and pieces of the past in artifacts and documents that mark the spot, tag the day, proclaim the person.

That may have been what drew us to the hill in Thorp Spring that stormy June in 1992. The announced occasion was to receive the Add-Ran College cornerstone, a white limestone square that had been put in place by the Masonic Lodge of Granbury when they erected the first Add-Ran administration building in 1878, five years after the establishment of the college in Thorp Spring. The stone's legend reads: "ADD-RAN COLLEGE / founded by J.A. Clark / A. Clark, President / R. Clark, Vice-President / 1873" -- solid evidence that TCU can claim, in truth, its now 124-year heritage. It had remained on the Thorp Spring property for one-hundred and fourteen years, and now it would find a new permanence on the Fort Worth campus, sealed into the statue of the brothers Clark -- Addison and Randolph -- sculpted by TCU graduate, Carol Thornton. Earlier attempts to procure the cornerstone had failed. This one, instigated by Carol and by Sally Armstrong, a TCU development officer, would succeed. The then owners of the property, the Dallas Christian School, had agreed to pass the stone to TCU, the university that grew from the Clarks' Thorp Spring beginnings. There would be perhaps a dozen of us to witness the ceremonial removal.

I approached the site, as did the others on the morning of June 11, 1992, from Granbury, driving west on Farm Road 4, which dips and crosses Stroud's Creek just before rising to the hill on which Thorp Spring perches. Heavy thunderstorms in the night had moved on south, but an oppressive air lingered, and a smoky haze. I soon learned that the smoky haze was from a still-smouldering fire adjacent to the cornerstone site. What was probably a bolt of lightning had struck in the early morning hours and started the fire that quickly consumed the "Clark House," which had weathered, I guessed, as many years as had the stone. The 2 1/2-story Clark House had been built in the 1870s and had probably been home to either Addison and Sallie, or Randolph and Ella, and their families, and had last been used as a dormitory for the summer camps of the Dallas Christian School in 1984. The thought that it would stand this long and be destroyed on the very day we took the last physical evidence of the early school in Thorp Spring, gave us pause. Had we disturbed the spirits of the Clarks, who loved this land, and many of whom were buried in the little cemetery just a half-mile south down Clay Street? Would there be further retribution if we persisted? Or perhpas it was a sign of approval, for now it would join the other few artifacts from those early days that had found their way to the Fort Worth campus.

Now, in this year of 1997, I had come back alone to stand and stay awhile and to ..... what? Conjure the old times of 1873 to 1895, before the school's relocation in Waco, and people them with the Clark family and the Add-Ran community of those days? I stood on the hill where a replica of the cornerstone now stands, the State of Texas having replaced the original to commemorate the historical site. Facing southwesterly, could just see, through the tops of the live oaks, the northern knob of Comanche Peak some ten miles distant, the "mountain" where AddRan students on picnic would carve their names in the rocks.

But if you stand, and stay, and if you know, you can see farther. If you know, you can trace the forty miles back down the dusty road from Fort Worth to the northeast, from whence Randolph first approached the Thorp Spring prairie in 1873, to investigate the possibility of moving his and brother Addison's "academy" thither from the city. Reflecting on his family's decision to relocate in Thorp Spring, Randolph wrote in his Reminiscences of 1919: "The Brazos River, the mountains, the valleys, the matchless never-failing Stroud Creek filled the requirements for student-life." In 1873, the Brazos was still unfettered by the Lake Granbury dam, and Stroud Creek was fed by the clear spring that Pleasant Thorp had named in his own honor.

If you stand, and stay, and know, you can see, a short distance across Farm Road 4 from where you stand, the remains of the native stone building or "house", as the Clarks called it, where the first classes of their Add-Ran Male and Female College (as it was initially chartered) met in 1873.

Looking farther into the past, but not too far distant, Comanches, Lipans, Kiowas, and Caddoes fill the scene.

If you stand, and stay, and know, the large limestone slabs just visible beneath the rough soil and wild grasses close to the spot on which you stand begin to form a pattern -- the foundation of the large building that held the cornerstone. Students bend over books inside its rooms and loiter in the shade of live oaks on the grounds surrounding it.

Turning west, the burnt-out Clark House comes into focus. Here imagination sees Addison's and Randolph's children playing, and Sallie and Ella going about woman's chores. One sees also the daunting figure of the papa, J.A. Clark, his heavily bearded face serious and lined with worry over the tenuous financial hold of the little school in those early years.

In the cemetery, where Addison, Sallie, 6-month-old Walter L., and 30-year-old Addison, Jr., "Little Addie," are buried, also lies papa's wife and the brothers' mother, Hetty D'Spain Clark, first Matron of the college. Her monument says simply, "We loved her."

Sometimes history fades without proof. But the stones at Thorp Spring and Comanche Peak speak and confirm us. The cornerstone and foundation stones of Add-Ran, the names carved in the stones of the Peak's weathered top, and the graveyard's lichened stones all proclaim: we were here, look for us, we were here.

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