McMurry opened on September 19, 1923, after Abilene Methodists raised $300,000 and gave the new college 42 acres south of downtown. Everything began in one building, the Administration Building now called Old Main, and the campus grew outward through the Depression and the postwar veteran boom. This walk, drawn from the university's own centennial tour, visits Old Main and its restored auditorium, a Depression-era rock garden, the War Hawk statue, the Radford tower, a dorm named for the World War II dead, the historical marker, and the park where the homecoming bonfire burns.
About this site
McMurry University is a private college or university in Abilene, Taylor County. It is one of 3 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Taylor County.
The site sits at 32.4293, -99.7489 near Abilene. The nearest cataloged historic site is McMurry College Administration Building (historic place), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Green, Roland A. D., House, McMurry College, and Cash, W. A. V., House.
McMurry grew out of a 1920 vote by the Northwest Texas Conference of the Methodist Church to open a college in Abilene; after the city helped secure land, its charter was ratified in November 1921. McMurry College, named for Methodist bishop William Fletcher McMurry, opened on September 20, 1923, with 191 students under founding president James Winfred Hunt, a Methodist minister who led it until 1934. The first graduating class, just four seniors, received degrees in 1926, the same year the school won accreditation as a senior college, and a fine-arts division was granting degrees by 1928. The Old Main administration building from those founding years still anchors the campus. In the early 1960s McMurry became the first college in Abilene to admit Black students, and in 1990 it adopted the name McMurry University. Its teams were long called the Indians in honor of Hunt, who grew up in Indian Territory; after an NCAA ruling the school dropped that name in 2006 and adopted the War Hawks in 2011.
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