St. Edward's University sits on a hill in South Austin, on farmland that Father Edward Sorin, the priest who founded Notre Dame, bought for the Congregation of Holy Cross in the 1870s. The Catholic school moved to this hilltop in 1889 and grew up around a white-limestone Gothic Revival castle that still anchors the campus. This short loop starts at that building and its twin, visits a centuries-old live oak and the campus chapel, and ends among newer buildings by a Pritzker Prize-winning architect.
About this site
St. Edward's 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 30.2297, -97.7550 near Austin. The nearest cataloged historic site is Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition (historical marker), about 0.3 miles away. Others within a short drive include Fort Magruder, C.S.A., Assumption, and Walter Tips House.
The university's founder was Rev. Edward Sorin, the Holy Cross priest behind the University of Notre Dame, who traveled to Austin in 1872 to take over a 398-acre farm south of town that the widow Mary Doyle wanted used for a Catholic school, along with a neighboring 123-acre tract from Col. Willis L. Robards. Two Holy Cross brothers started farming the property in 1874, though teaching did not begin until 1878, in Doyle's old farmhouse; three years later, with a pair of wooden schoolhouses in place, the school was named St. Edward's Academy after Sorin's patron saint. Texas chartered it as St. Edward's College in 1885, and in 1889 it moved onto the Robards tract, where Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton designed its first main building. That building burned in 1903 and Clayton drew the Gothic Revival limestone replacement that still crowns the hill, surviving damage from a 1922 tornado and joining the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The school was rechartered as St. Edward's University in 1925. Women were admitted in 1966 through a coordinate women's college, Maryhill, and the campus became fully coeducational in 1970. In 1972 St. Edward's started its College Assistance Migrant Program to help children of migrant farmworkers attend college. Today it is a Catholic liberal arts university in South Austin known for its hilltop views of downtown and its Hilltoppers athletic teams.
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