The completion of the Louisiana Western Railroad in 1880 – connecting it to New Orleans and Houston — had turned Lake Charles from a small village to a growing town.

[1] The growth of a timber industry led to new rail lines and made Lake Charles the commercial center of southwest Louisiana.

It had also attracted a large number of Northern settlers, particularly from midwestern states like Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota, who brought their Protestant faiths into more Catholic south Louisiana.

[3] On June 21, 1887, a meeting of Lake Charles residents heard from Cyrus Ingerson Scofield of Dallas, who served as superintendent of the American Home Missionary Society for Texas and Louisiana.

Now farms are opened, the prairies are already dotted with homes, and thriving villages bead the long line of the railroad.

[8] In 1886, he moved to Austin, Texas to lead the Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute, a Congregational college for African Americans which, through merger, later became Huston–Tillotson University.

[9] On October 2, 1890, Lake Charles College opened its first term, its main building completed at a cost of nearly $20,000.

[16] Congregational churches supported many schools in the South which served African Americans, including Straight University in New Orleans, but Lake Charles College was for whites only.

Some northern critics, like The Independent, argued that "the colored people need its privileges quite as much as the white" and that "It would be a wrong to the givers for any Congregational society to continue to support such an institution.

[7] The college building sat unused for about a year; control of the physical plant passed to Jabez B. Watkins, the Kansas developer who controlled the North American Land & Timber Co.[10] Several groups considered opening another school there; a group of Louisiana Baptists considered using it to house the institution that later opened as Louisiana College in Pineville in 1906.

[32] Immediately after closing the college, J. T. Barrett was named superintendent of the Louisiana Baptist Orphanage, which was being relocating from near Mansfield to Lake Charles.

[33][34][35] Barrett spent the remainder of his life in a number of fields, including oil speculation, insurance, and rice milling.

[36][37][38][39] He remained active in the Baptist church, both as a preacher and in administrative roles, until his death in Lake Charles in 1939.