Fort Worth · Tarrant County · Private · Official site
Texas campuses and the stories they hold.
About the campus
Texas Wesleyan began in 1890 as Polytechnic College, a Methodist school planted on donated land east of Fort Worth, and the neighborhood that grew around it still carries the name Polytechnic Heights. The school spent two decades as Texas Woman's College before a 1935 merger made it coeducational again, and it became a university in 1989. Rather than leave its old neighborhood, Wesleyan has restored churches and early buildings around its limestone core. This compact walk covers the original administration hall, two former church sanctuaries, the library, and the pioneer cemetery a block east.
About this site
Texas Wesleyan University is a private college or university in Fort Worth, Tarrant County. It is one of 10 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Tarrant County.
The site sits at 32.7324, -97.2801 near Fort Worth. The nearest cataloged historic site is Administration Building (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Ann Waggoner Hall, Saint Mark United Methodist Church, and Meadowbrook Methodist Church.
Texas Wesleyan began life in 1890 as Polytechnic College, a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, school planned under Bishop Joseph S. Key on high ground east of Fort Worth that local businessmen A. S. Hall, W. D. Hall and George Tandy gave to the church; land beyond the campus became the Polytechnic Heights neighborhood. Roughly a hundred students showed up when classes started in 1891. President Hiram A. Boaz, who took over in 1902, steadied the school's finances and put up the stone Administration Building in 1902-03, known today as the Oneal-Sells Administration Building and a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. Boaz hoped to turn Polytechnic into the church's great Southwestern university, but Methodist leaders chose to build Southern Methodist University in Dallas instead, and in 1914 the Fort Worth campus was reborn as Texas Woman's College; Sanguinet & Staats' Dan Waggoner Hall was added in 1917. The Depression pushed the college to the brink, and with backing tied to the former Texas Wesleyan Academy in Austin it reopened to men and took the name Texas Wesleyan College in the mid-1930s. Education and nurse-anesthesia graduate programs came in the 1970s and 1980s, and after weighing a move to west Fort Worth the college chose to stay put, marking the decision with the Eunice and James L. West Library in 1988. It became Texas Wesleyan University in 1989, ran a law school from 1992 until selling it to Texas A&M in 2013, and in 2015 finished the Rosedale Renaissance project, which added the Canafax Clock Tower and helped revitalize the surrounding neighborhood. In 2023 Emily W. Messer became the university's first woman president.
Ann Waggoner Building on the Texas Wesleyan campus. Photo: Renelibrary, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsHistoric postcard of Dan Waggoner Hall when the school was Texas Woman's College. Photo: The Albertype Co. (Brooklyn), Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsEarly postcard view of the Polytechnic College campus in Fort Worth. Photo: A. Zeese Eng. Co. (Dallas), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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