Wichita Falls · Wichita County · Public · Official site
Texas campuses and the stories they hold.
About the campus
Midwestern State began in 1922 as Wichita Falls Junior College, sharing space with the city high school, and moved to this site on Taft Boulevard in 1937. Its red-brick, tile-roofed buildings with arched facades give the campus a unified Mediterranean look that has been carried through nearly a century of growth. Now part of the Texas Tech University System and billed as the state's public liberal arts university, MSU Texas makes for an easy walk from the original 1937 building to the quad, the student center, and the lake at the campus edge.
About this site
Midwestern State University is a public college or university in Wichita Falls, Wichita County.
The site sits at 33.8763, -98.5198 near Wichita Falls. The nearest cataloged historic site is Midwestern University Desegregation (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include John Hart Wilson, Wichita Falls Women's Forum, and Weeks House.
Wichita Falls opened a city-run junior college in 1922, only the second of its kind in Texas, with Dr. Randolph Lee Clark as its founding leader; for its first years Wichita Falls Junior College borrowed classrooms and teachers from the local high school. Support from philanthropist John G. Hardin and his wife, whose foundation pushed for a separate campus in the mid-1930s, helped the college move in 1937 to a 40-acre site on the city's southwest side donated in part by W. B. Hamilton and N. H. Martin, and it was renamed Hardin Junior College in the couple's honor. The Hardin Administration Building, a Lombard-Romanesque design whose bell tower still marks the skyline, was the new campus's only structure when it opened and is the oldest building there today. A senior division was added in 1946 as Hardin College, the name became Midwestern University in 1950, and a graduate school followed in 1959. The state took over the university from the city on September 1, 1961, and the Legislature renamed it Midwestern State University in 1975. It later opened a satellite site in Flower Mound in 2018 and joined the Texas Tech University System on September 1, 2021. Today MSU Texas is known as the state's public liberal arts university, with programs spanning fine arts, business, engineering and health sciences on a campus of roughly 255 acres.
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