First Classes of the University of Texas Law School

Robert S. Gould came to teaching from a broken career on the bench. A North Carolinian who graduated from the University of Alabama, he practiced at Centerville from 1850, sat in the Secession Convention, and resigned a district judgeship in 1861 to raise a battalion; at Jenkins Ferry he was wounded and his horse shot from under him. Reelected judge in 1866, he was removed the next year as an "impediment to Reconstruction." He joined the Texas Supreme Court in 1874, and Governor Roberts made him chief justice in 1881. He taught law until the spring of 1904.

What the plaque says

First Classes of the University of Texas Law School The University of Texas held its first classes in the Temporary Capitol at this site on Sept. 15, 1883. Fifty-two of the 218 original students were registered in the Law department. They were taught by former governor of Texas Oran M. Roberts (1815-1898) and former Texas Supreme Court justice Robert S. Gould (1826-1904). Many members of the University's first law class went on to have distinguished careers, including Albert Sidney Burleson, who served as U.S. Postmaster General from 1913 to 1921 and Yancy Lewis, who later returned to serve as a law school professor. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — steps away
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.5 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• Harry Ransom Center — 0.8 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.

More markers nearby

• African Americans in the Texas Revolution — steps away
• Governor James Edward Ferguson, Governor Miriam A. Ferguson — steps away
• Governor Edmund Jackson Davis — steps away
• Henry Smith — steps away