The walking trail will be named in memory of Robert “Mr. Bob” Worley, who lived on North Sixth Street, across from the park, and who worked tirelessly with the city parks officials to improve Jackson Park.
He urged that the trails and other park amenities be accessible to wheelchair-bound visitors who lived in the area, said Kim Mettenbrink, city of Temple park planner.
“He believed that while the city was growing west and investing money in new facilities, it still had a responsibility to the older neighborhoods and to the people who had helped put Temple on the map,” said his daughter, Penny Worley.
Unfortunately, Worley, a retired J.C. Penney manager, died in December 2007 at age 80 before work began that July for the $156,000 project, which includes a pavilion and walking trail.
A Temple-based manufacturer of custom signs, iZone, donated a full-color sign with historical information about the park and biographical information about Worley.
Not as large as other neighborhood parks, the 7.7-acre Jackson Park does have a playground, basketball court, three picnic tables, barbecue grill, picnic pavilion and restrooms.
The park developed from the gifts of two prominent families, each with separate ties to the city’s two community hospitals - King’s Daughters and Scott & White.
The park’s first half was donated by Herbert McIlhenny McCelvey (1836-1915) and his wife, Jennie (1846-1930), and their sons, H.M. Jr., George and John S. McCelvey. John S. McCelvey was also a respected physician and among the early leaders in the establishment of King’s Daughters Hospital in 1896.
Besides extensive real estate, the family also owned investment companies. By 1909, the McCelveys wanted to develop some of that property into a residential neighborhood, called “North Park,” north of Jackson Avenue. At the same time, the city began ambitious street paving and capital improvements. In 1910, the city limits in this area ended at Houston Street, but the town founded by the Santa Fe Railway in 1881 was booming. City leaders and the Santa Fe wanted to expand.
The McCelveys, eager for success, donated the lower tract along the creek as a park. The city took possession on May 10, 1910, and annexed it and North Park the following March.
Meanwhile, Arthur Carroll Scott Jr., M.D., (1865-1940) and his wife, Maude (1868-1950), owned the adjacent land, where they grazed cattle. Scott, a nationally respected surgeon and co-founder of Scott & White, donated the park’s remaining 3.8 acres on Jan. 26, 1931, to the city just as the city was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding.
Scott placed three restrictions: No streets could run through it, it could never be named for him and the grounds must always be used as a public park.
The Temple Daily Telegram proclaimed that the park would be “one of the most beautiful in the city.” Park improvements were gradually added through several federal and state work relief programs during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Over the following decades, civic and social organizations donated landscaping, benches and playground equipment.
pbenoit@temple-telegram.com
