San Antonio · Bexar County · Private · Official site
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About the campus
The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word came to San Antonio to nurse the sick and teach, and in 1897 they settled on the old Brackenridge estate at the head of the San Antonio River. A girls' academy on the grounds grew into a college that awarded its first bachelor's degree in 1910. Today the university shares its hilltop with the sisters' motherhouse, chapel and gardens. This walk moves from the college's historic buildings through the sisters' grounds and down to the Blue Hole, the spring where the river starts.
About this site
University of the Incarnate Word 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 29.4667, -98.4650 near San Antonio. The nearest cataloged historic site is Incarnate Word College (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include University of the Incarnate Word Administration Building, Rodriguez, Dionicio, Bridge in Brackenridge Park, and Twohig House.
The University of the Incarnate Word was started by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, a congregation of French nuns who arrived in San Antonio in 1869 at Bishop Claude Dubuis's request to nurse victims of a cholera epidemic and soon opened the city's first hospital and its first orphanages. In July 1881 the sisters secured a state charter for a Catholic women's college, the seed of today's university. In 1897 the sisters bought land from the estate of George W. Brackenridge, and in 1900 the Academy of the Incarnate Word moved to that tract at the headwaters of the San Antonio River, beside what became Brackenridge Park, where the congregation's motherhouse also stands. College courses joined the academy's curriculum in 1909, when it took the name College and Academy of the Incarnate Word, and the buildings that form the core of the campus were in use by 1922. Men had long been admitted to the nursing program, and in 1971 the college became fully coeducational. It became the University of the Incarnate Word in 1996, won approval to award doctorates two years later, and launched an NCAA football program in 2008. Since then it has added a school of osteopathic medicine on San Antonio's South Side, campuses in Mexico and a European study center, while the chapel and the spring-fed river headwaters remain at the heart of the original grounds. Today UIW is the largest Catholic university in Texas.
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