Lamar University Campus Tour

Lamar University opened in 1923 as South Park Junior College and took the name of Republic of Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar in 1932. Its campus sits next to Spindletop Hill, where the 1901 Lucas gusher launched the modern oil age and made Beaumont a boomtown. This walk runs from the eight-story library at the center of campus past the student center, art museum, and football stadium, and ends at the university-run reconstruction of the boomtown and the granite monument to the gusher.

Few universities sit this close to the spot where an industry was born. Lamar University's Beaumont campus borders Spindletop Hill, where the Lucas gusher roared in on January 10, 1901, and this walk links everyday university life with the oil strike that turned a quiet town into a boomtown almost overnight.

On campus, the eight-story Mary and John Gray Library is the tallest landmark, and named rooms inside such as the Spindletop Room hint at the story next door. The Dishman Art Museum, a free teaching gallery with works from many cultures and periods and a changing slate of exhibitions, is another highlight.

The showpiece is the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum, which the university dedicated on the gusher's 75th anniversary. Its wooden derricks and clapboard storefronts are modeled on buildings from the boom, and the town's name honors Gladys Bingham, a Sunday school pupil of Pattillo Higgins, the self-taught geologist who insisted for years that oil lay beneath the hill. Close by rises the 58-foot granite obelisk honoring the Lucas well, estimated to have flowed about 100,000 barrels a day; the monument was relocated in 1978 because the ground at its first site was sinking.

In a single walk you'll go from a college named for a Republic of Texas president to the birthplace of the modern oil age, a rare pairing in Texas.