San Antonio · Bexar County · Private · Official site
Texas campuses and the stories they hold.
About the campus
The Marianist brothers opened a school in San Antonio in 1852, and in 1894 they built a boarding college on what was then open country at the end of a buggy trail northwest of town. That building, St. Louis Hall, still anchors the campus; the downtown college moved here in 1923 under the St. Mary's name, and it became St. Mary's University in 1927. This walk starts at the Marian statue at the entrance, visits the historic hall and the chapel the brothers built, and finishes under the bell tower and among the pecan trees where alumni have gathered for more than a century.
About this site
St. Mary's University is a private college or university in San Antonio, Bexar County. It is one of 17 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Bexar County.
The site sits at 29.4530, -98.5610 near San Antonio. The nearest cataloged historic site is St. Louis Hall at St. Mary's University (historic place), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Marianist. Society of Mary, Wesley Peacock House, and Thomas Jefferson High School.
St. Mary's traces its start to 1852, when Marianist brothers from France reached San Antonio at the request of Bishop John Mary Odin and opened St. Mary's Institute downtown with about a dozen boys enrolled. The school outgrew its first rooms almost at once, moving in 1853 to a new building across the San Antonio River, and in 1882 it began calling itself St. Mary's College. As boarding enrollment climbed, the Marianists built St. Louis College on a 75-acre tract in the West Heights area in 1894, and three years later the state authorized the college division to grant degrees. In 1923 the college-level classes left downtown for the St. Louis College grounds, which took the St. Mary's name, while younger students stayed behind at what became St. Mary's Academy. Alumni finished Alumni Gym in 1925, and in 1927 the school became St. Mary's University. A law school joined in 1934 and graduate study began in 1936. Women could enroll in evening, summer and law classes for decades, but the main campus did not become fully coeducational until 1963. The towering, many-windowed St. Louis Hall still fronts the campus, and the university bills itself as the oldest Catholic university in Texas and the American Southwest.
The campus bell tower at St. Mary's University. Photo: Zereshk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsEarly aerial view of St. Louis College, the campus St. Mary's moved to in 1923 (U.S. National Archives). Photo: Unknown photographer (U.S. National Archives), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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