Huston-Tillotson sits on a rise in East Austin, on ground that has been a campus for African American students since the 1880s. The university grew out of two schools, Tillotson College and Samuel Huston College, which joined forces in 1952. In 2022 the campus itself was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district. This short loop takes in the early stone and concrete-block halls, the mid-century modernist buildings of the post-merger years, and the chapel that anchors the grounds.
About this site
Huston-Tillotson University is a private college or university in Austin, Travis County. It is one of 8 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Travis County.
The site sits at 30.2653, -97.7225 near Austin. The nearest cataloged historic site is Tillotson College (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Administration Building, Blackshear Elementary School, and Evans Industrial Building.
Huston-Tillotson is the product of two 19th-century schools founded to educate formerly enslaved people and their children in Austin. Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute was planned by George Jeffrey Tillotson and built by the Congregational churches' American Missionary Association; chartered in 1877, it opened on January 17, 1881, with Allen Hall as its first building. Samuel Huston College grew from a Methodist school that started in Dallas and moved to Austin in 1878, taking its name from Samuel Huston, an Iowa farmer whose 1887 gift helped buy land in East Austin; it opened under president Reuben S. Lovinggood in 1900. Tillotson operated as a women's college from 1926 until 1935, while Samuel Huston earned regional accreditation in 1934, and in the 1944–45 season Jackie Robinson served as its basketball coach shortly before his baseball career took off. The two schools merged on October 24, 1952, as Huston-Tillotson College on the hill once called Bluebonnet Hill, just east of today's I-35. It became Huston-Tillotson University in 2005, and in 2022 its campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district. Marking its 150th year, the university received a $150 million gift from the Moody Foundation in 2025, one of the largest ever made to an HBCU.
King-Seabrook Chapel. Photo: WhisperToMe, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsAgard-Lovinggood Lecture Hall. Photo: WhisperToMe, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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