Sam Houston State opened in 1879 as Sam Houston Normal Institute, a teacher-training school, and it held its first classes in a building Austin College had left behind. The campus is on land that once belonged to Sam Houston, whose home and final residence are preserved at the museum at the south end. This walk goes from a Greek Revival hall of the 1850s to the ruins of the 1890 Old Main, then down to the grounds where Houston lived and died. It covers the history of the school and of the man it was named for.
About this site
Sam Houston State University is a public college or university in Huntsville, Walker County.
The site sits at 30.7156, -95.5501 near Huntsville. The nearest cataloged historic site is Austin Hall (historic place), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Peabody Library Building, "Old" Main Building, and Sam Houston Memorial Museum.
Sam Houston State grew up on land first used by Austin College, a Presbyterian school that moved from Huntsville to Sherman in 1876; that college's Austin Hall, completed in 1851, still stands and is widely cited as the oldest university building west of the Mississippi that remains in use. On San Jacinto Day, April 21, 1879, Governor Oran M. Roberts signed the law creating Sam Houston Normal Institute, the first state-supported school in Texas devoted to preparing public-school teachers. Classes opened that October 10 with 110 students and four faculty under principal Bernard Mallon, who died less than two weeks later. The institute was named for Sam Houston, who had made Huntsville his home and is buried there. In 1901 a grant from the George Peabody fund paid for the Peabody Memorial Library, remembered as the first free-standing campus library in Texas and now restored as an event space. A four-year course arrived in 1915, the first bachelor's degrees followed in 1919, and graduate work was authorized in 1936, while the name evolved to Sam Houston State Teachers College (1923), Sam Houston State College (1965) and Sam Houston State University (1969). After World War II the school acquired a former prisoner-of-war camp outside town, adding hundreds of acres for agriculture and research. Today the R2 university, part of the Texas State University System, is especially known for its College of Criminal Justice, one of the largest and oldest programs of its kind in the country.
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