Prairie View A&M University (College & University)
Prairie View · Waller County · Public · Official site
Texas campuses and the stories they hold.
About the campus
Prairie View A&M was authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1876 as a land-grant college for Black Texans, opening on the grounds of the former Alta Vista plantation in Waller County. Across a century and a half it grew from a struggling normal school into a major historically Black university with thousands of students. The plantation house and the earliest buildings are gone, but a cluster of brick halls from the 1920s through the 1940s survives, and six of them are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This walk starts at the university's state marker and loops through that historic core before ending at the old veterinary hospital, about a mile and a half in all.
About this site
Prairie View A&M University is a public college or university in Prairie View, Waller County.
The site sits at 30.0887, -95.9882 near Prairie View. The nearest cataloged historic site is Prairie View A&M University (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include St. Francis Episcopal Church, Banks, W.R., Library, and Evans, Annie Laurie, Hall.
Prairie View A&M dates to 1876, when the Texas Legislature, acting under the new state constitution and the federal Morrill Land-Grant Act, authorized an agricultural and mechanical college for Black students as a branch of the A&M College of Texas; Black legislators including Senator Matthew Gaines are credited with pressing for it. The state bought the former Alta Vista Plantation near Hempstead in Waller County, and eight young men enrolled in March 1878. Enrollment was so thin that the school was reorganized in 1879 as Prairie View Normal Institute, a coeducational teacher-training school housed partly in the old plantation house, later called Kirby Hall. Under principals such as L. C. Anderson and Edward L. Blackshear it added agricultural and mechanical programs, hosted Booker T. Washington as commencement speaker in 1897, and became Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College in 1899. Principal Willette R. Banks, who arrived in 1926, built up four-year and graduate programs and courses meant to parallel those at the University of Texas. The school became Prairie View A&M College in 1947, opened to students of all races in the 1960s, and took its present name in 1973. A 1984 constitutional amendment made it a beneficiary of the Permanent University Fund and an "institution of the first class" within the Texas A&M System. Today Prairie View is the largest HBCU in Texas, holds R2 research status, and is known for engineering, nursing, architecture and its Marching Storm band.
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