Childers Classical Institute

The institute had four presidents in its first six years: Barret, H. C. Darden, R. L. Whiteside and Alonzo B. Cox. Stability came in 1912 with Jesse Parker Sewell, a young Tennessee preacher who had come to West Texas because of tuberculosis. In its early years the school was ungraded, with classes from elementary grades to junior college, so a student could take one course at high school level and another at college level and earn credit for both. It became a junior college officially in 1912 and a senior college in 1919, a year before the name changed.

What the plaque says

Abilene Christian University began as an educational institution on this block known as the West End residential area. In 1906, Allen Booker Barret, a Tennessee educator and preacher, and five trustees purchased land and a house from Col. John W. Childers. That fall, president Barret, his brother W.S., and Charles H. Roberson opened Childers Classical Institute. The first class comprised 25 students, with 50 enrolling during the school year. In 1920, the institute's name changed to Abilene Christian College and in 1929, moved to its current site. The college grew slowly at first, but today, thousands of students are enrolled at Abilene Christian University, more than 100 years after its founding. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 1.1 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 12 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 14 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Abilene State Park — 17 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.

More markers nearby

• James Harrison Parramore — 0.7 mi
• Company I, 7th Texas Infantry — 0.8 mi
• Abilene Reporter-News — 0.8 mi
• The Texas & Pacific Railway: First Railroad Across West Texas — 0.8 mi