Cisco College

A North Texas newspaper placed O. C. Britton's Training School on the highest peak in Eastland County, above the mosquito line. Randolph College, backed by the First Christian Church, took over the campus in 1923 and closed as a junior college in 1934. Gov. W. Lee O'Daniel signed the law authorizing Cisco Junior College on May 8, 1939, and classes began on September 10, 1940, with 124 students in the first year. During World War II its Cisco War Training School trained women as mechanics, the first such program in the country.

What the plaque says

O.C. Britton opened Cisco's first college in 1909, with a campus established on 212 acres of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad survey. The school closed after the onset of World War I, and the site was used by a series of three later colleges that opened and closed by 1938. Understanding the importance of higher education, Cisco residents encouraged the Texas Legislature to establish Cisco Junior College as part of the Cisco Independent School District in 1939. The college functioned as a branch of the school district until 1956. The school has flourished, and a free-standing Abilene campus was constructed in 2003. The institution's name was changed to Cisco College in 2009, and it remains a vital part of the local and regional community. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 0.6 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 9.7 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Old Jail Art Center — 29 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church of Cisco — 0.8 mi
• First Baptist Church of Cisco — 1.0 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Cisco — 1.0 mi
• Hittson Ranch Headquarters on Battle Creek — 8.9 mi