Sam Houston State University Campus Tour

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.

Few campuses in Texas are as closely tied to one person as Sam Houston State, and this walk through Huntsville's oak-shaded historic core follows two intertwined stories: the growth of the state's first teacher-training school and the last years of the man it was named for.

The school's side centers on Austin Hall, a Greek Revival building whose cornerstone Austin College laid in 1851. Texas's first law school met there, and after Austin College moved to Sherman in 1876 it was, for eleven years, the only building of the new Sam Houston Normal Institute. Nearby, the Old Main memorial traces the footprint of the grand 1891 hall that burned for about 17 hours in February 1982, in a fire that very nearly took Austin Hall too.

The other thread plays out on land Sam Houston once owned. The university-run Sam Houston Memorial Museum grew out of a 1905 campaign by normal-school history students, and its grounds hold about ten buildings. Among them are Woodland, the dogtrot log home where the Houston family lived during his years in the U.S. Senate, and the oddly shaped Steamboat House, where Houston died in 1863 after leaving the governor's office.

The museum grounds are free to enter, which makes this an easy, history-packed add-on to any Huntsville visit.