The University of Texas opened on its original Forty Acres north of the Capitol in 1883, and the campus has spread far beyond that square since. Its look was set in the 1910s and 1930s by architects Cass Gilbert and Paul Cret, whose red tile roofs and limestone walls still define the core. This walk starts at a cattleman's Victorian mansion, climbs to the Tower, passes the old library and a world-class rare-books archive, descends the South Mall past a World War I fountain, and ends at an Ellsworth Kelly art chapel and the Longhorns' memorial stadium.
About this site
University of Texas at Austin is a public 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 30.2878, -97.7406 near Austin. The nearest cataloged historic site is Littlefield Home (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Battle Hall, Gerhard-Schoch House, and University Baptist Church.
The Texas Constitution of 1876 called for a "university of the first class," and in a statewide vote in September 1881 Austin won the main campus while Galveston was chosen for the medical department. The university formally opened on September 15, 1883, on the forty-acre College Hill tract; its first students met in the temporary state Capitol while the Victorian Gothic Old Main was completed. The 1923 oil strike at Santa Rita No. 1 on university-owned land in West Texas enriched the Permanent University Fund and bankrolled a wave of construction across the Forty Acres. Old Main was torn down in 1934, and the Main Building with its 307-foot Tower, designed by Paul Philippe Cret, rose in its place and was completed in 1937; the Tower is still lit burnt orange for athletic wins and other milestones. Black students were first admitted in the summer of 1950 following the U.S. Supreme Court's Sweatt v. Painter decision, and the first Black undergraduates entered in the fall of 1956. The Legislature renamed the school The University of Texas at Austin in 1967 to reflect the growing UT System, and in 1971 the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum was dedicated on the east side of campus. A member of the Association of American Universities since 1929, UT Austin is the flagship and largest campus of the UT System.
See this site and every marker, cemetery, courthouse, museum and landmark across Texas on one live map — find what's near you, get directions, and check in as you roam.
