Southwestern Adventist University opened in 1893 as the Keene Industrial Academy, a Seventh-day Adventist school that paired classroom study with practical trades, and the town of Keene grew up around it. Its rural Johnson County campus is small and walkable, but it holds a few surprises: a Depression-era brick-and-petrified-wood gateway, a heritage archive, one of the country's larger dinosaur fossil collections, and a public observatory. This short loop takes in all of them along with the town's big Adventist church, in well under two miles.
About this site
Southwestern Adventist University is a private college or university in Keene, Johnson County.
The site sits at 32.3965, -97.3265 near Keene. The nearest cataloged historic site is Mizpah Gate (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Keene Cemetery, Buell Cemetery, and Arnold, Oliver Perry.
Seventh-day Adventists from the Dallas area bought land in Johnson County for a church school in 1893, and Keene Industrial Academy opened on a ten-acre tract on January 7, 1894, with 56 students and two teachers. Its first building doubled as a church, and students earned their way through a broom factory, blacksmith and carpentry shops, a bakery and a print shop, starting a work-study tradition that still marks the school. It added two years of college work in 1916 as Southwestern Junior College, became Southwestern Union College in 1963, and turned four-year as Southwestern Adventist College in 1977 before taking its current name in 1996. The Chan Shun Centennial Library, completed in 1994 on the highest point in Johnson County, overlooks a campus that grew to about 150 acres, and the university remains the heart of Keene, a town long described as closing most of its stores for the Saturday Sabbath.
The Chan Shun Centennial Library, completed in 1994. Photo: Anonymous, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsThe stone Mizpah Gate at Southwestern Adventist University. Photo: Renelibrary, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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