Georgetown · Williamson County · Private · Official site
Texas campuses and the stories they hold.
About the campus
Southwestern University traces its lineage to four Methodist colleges chartered in the days of the Republic and early statehood, merged into one school that settled in Georgetown in 1873. Its permanent campus rose on the east side of town at the close of the 1890s around a hand-cut limestone administration building that still anchors the grounds. This walk begins at the state marker that tells the school's origin story, circles the Romanesque Cullen Building and its companion dormitory, and then follows the academic mall to the chapel, library, fine arts center, and a hilltop observatory. Expect a compact, level loop of about a mile and a half.
About this site
Southwestern University is a private college or university in Georgetown, Williamson County. It is one of 3 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Williamson County.
The site sits at 30.6336, -97.6652 near Georgetown. The nearest cataloged historic site is Southwestern University (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Daughtrey, E. M., House (Gone), The Woman's Club of Georgetown, and Wilcox, D. K. and Inez, House.
Southwestern University descends from four Methodist schools chartered in the Republic and early statehood years: Rutersville College, Wesleyan College, McKenzie College and Soule University. The university counts 1840, when Rutersville College opened, as its founding year. In 1870 Texas Methodist conferences agreed to merge those efforts into a single central institution, and under Francis Asbury Mood, its first president, it opened in Georgetown in October 1873 as Texas University. Because the state wanted that name for its planned flagship in Austin, the Legislature rechartered the school as Southwestern University in 1875. Its landmark Administration Building, a Richardsonian Romanesque pile of rough-cut stone dating from 1898 and later renamed for Hugh Roy and Lillie Cullen, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; nearby Mood-Bridwell Hall, a former men's dormitory, followed in 1908. A failed attempt to move Southwestern to Dallas helped lead to the founding of Southern Methodist University in 1911, and afterward Southwestern refocused as a small liberal arts college. A building program that began in the 1940s added the Lois Perkins Chapel on the academic mall, and in 1965 Ernest Clark enrolled as the university's first Black student, graduating in 1969. Today Southwestern enrolls about 1,500 undergraduates and competes as the Pirates in NCAA Division III.
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