Texas State climbs a limestone hill above the headwaters of the San Marcos River, a setting few Texas campuses can match. It opened in 1903 as Southwest Texas State Normal School, a teacher-training college whose most famous graduate, Lyndon B. Johnson, finished here in 1930. This walk starts at the library that holds the Wittliff Collections, crosses the Quad past the university's two best-known statues, visits the turreted Old Main, and then drops down to the spring-fed river at Sewell Park and Spring Lake.
About this site
Texas State University is a public college or university in San Marcos, Hays County.
The site sits at 29.8889, -97.9431 near San Marcos. The nearest cataloged historic site is The Wittliff Collections (museum), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Old Main, Beverly Hutchison House, and First United Methodist Church.
Texas State began with a bill signed by Governor Joseph D. Sayers on May 10, 1899, that created Southwest Texas State Normal School to train teachers for the state's public schools. The city of San Marcos gave 11 acres on Chautauqua Hill, and once the Legislature paid for construction the school opened in September 1903 with 303 students in the Victorian Gothic Main Building, now known as Old Main and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As its academic standing grew it became Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1923, Southwest Texas State College in 1959, and Southwest Texas State University in 1969. Black students first enrolled in 1963 after a federal court ruled in a lawsuit brought by Dana Smith that they could not be turned away because of race. The school's most famous graduate, Lyndon B. Johnson, came back in November 1965 to sign the Higher Education Act in the campus gymnasium, recalling how hard he had worked to pay his own way. In 1994 the university acquired the Aquarena Springs resort at the head of the San Marcos River and converted it into a water research and education center, today the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment. A student-led campaign produced the name Texas State University-San Marcos in 2003, and the city was dropped from the name in 2013; today it is one of the largest universities in Texas, an R2 research institution and Hispanic-Serving Institution known for programs such as its Forensic Anthropology Center and the Wittliff Collections.
See this site and every marker, cemetery, courthouse, museum and landmark across Texas on one live map — find what's near you, get directions, and check in as you roam.
