Texas Technological College was created in 1923 on the open plains west of Lubbock and opened in 1925 with a handful of buildings designed by Wyatt C. Hedrick. The Spanish Renaissance look he gave the core, with red tile roofs and ornate towers, still defines the campus. Agriculture was central to the young college, and two of its oldest structures are a livestock pavilion and a dairy barn. This walk starts at the Memorial Circle entrance, circles the bell-towered Administration Building and a famous bronze cowboy, visits those farm buildings, and finishes at the university's museums of the Plains and ranch life.
About this site
Texas Tech University is a public college or university in Lubbock, Lubbock County. It is one of 3 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Lubbock County.
The site sits at 33.5846, -101.8747 near Lubbock. The nearest cataloged historic site is Texas Tech Judging Pavilion (historical marker), about 0.2 miles away. Others within a short drive include Texas Tech University Dairy Barn, Texas Technological College Dairy Barn, and Snyder, Fred and Annie, House.
West Texans lobbied for a college of their own for decades, and after an aborted plan for an A&M branch in Abilene and a 1921 veto, Governor Pat Neff signed the bill creating Texas Technological College on February 10, 1923. A site committee picked Lubbock over rivals such as Plainview, Floydada, Big Spring and Sweetwater, and Paul Whitfield Horn became the first president. Some 20,000 people turned out in November 1924 to see the cornerstone of the Spanish Renaissance-style Administration Building set in place, and the college opened in October 1925 with 914 men and women enrolled in agriculture, engineering, home economics and liberal arts. Enrollment dipped during World War II, when the campus trained thousands of servicemen, then surged in the postwar years. Lucille Graves became the first Black student admitted in 1961, and the school's first athletic scholarship to a Black athlete followed in 1967. After years of argument over whether to drop the word "Technological" while keeping the Double T, the Legislature approved the name Texas Tech University in 1969, the same year it chartered a medical school that grew into the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. A separate Texas Tech University System was formed in 1996. Today the university is a Carnegie R1 research institution of roughly 40,000 students, known for its Spanish Renaissance-inspired campus, the National Ranching Heritage Center, a nationally ranked public art collection, and Red Raider traditions like the Masked Rider.
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