UT Arlington traces its roots to a small private school that opened on this ground in 1895, followed by a military academy and a training school. In 1917 it became Grubbs Vocational College, a junior-college branch of Texas A&M, and later North Texas Agricultural College and Arlington State College before joining the UT System in 1965. This walk starts at the university's historical marker and its oldest surviving building, passes a theater where Louis Armstrong opened the season in 1965, climbs to a major Texas map collection, and ends at a small cemetery tied to a remarkable early-1900s rescue home.
About this site
University of Texas at Arlington is a public college or university in Arlington, Tarrant County. It is one of 10 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Tarrant County.
The site sits at 32.7298, -97.1139 near Arlington. The nearest cataloged historic site is The University of Texas at Arlington (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Site of Berachah Home and Cemetery, Vaught House, and First Baptist Church of Arlington.
UT Arlington traces its beginnings to September 1895, when local merchant Edward Emmett Rankin rallied Arlington residents to donate land and building materials for Arlington College, a private school for younger pupils on the ground the university still occupies. For the next two decades the property changed hands among a string of private military academies, the best known being James M. Carlisle's Carlisle Military Academy, opened in 1902, and one after another they failed. In 1917 the state turned the campus into Grubbs Vocational College, a junior-college branch of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas; it became North Texas Agricultural College in 1923 and, as farming dropped out of the curriculum, Arlington State College in 1949. Postwar growth in Arlington pushed enrollment sharply upward, and the Legislature approved four-year status in 1959. The college admitted its first Black students in the fall of 1962, after desegregation was announced under the threat of an NAACP-backed lawsuit. Local leaders, frustrated that the A&M board was holding back new degrees and construction, won a transfer to the University of Texas System on September 1, 1965; a graduate school with its first master's degrees followed that year, and the school adopted its present name in 1967. After years of controversy over a Confederate-themed 'Rebels' identity, which the UT System finally abolished, students voted in 1971 to become the Mavericks. Ransom Hall and College Hall along the Second Street Mall are among the oldest buildings on a campus that now centers on the Central Library and its surrounding mall. Today UTA is a Carnegie R1 research university and one of the largest universities in Texas by enrollment.
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