Home Management House Program, School of Home Economics

Home Economics was one of the four schools Texas Technological College opened with in 1925, alongside Agriculture, Engineering and Liberal Arts. The schools were renamed divisions in 1933, the year the college survived a legislative move to cut its size and scope sharply, and became schools again in 1944. Six men led the college: Paul W. Horn, Bradford Knapp, Clifford B. Jones, Edward N. Jones, Robert C. Goodwin and Grover E. Murray. Tech joined the Southwest Conference on May 10, 1956, and on September 1, 1969, the legislature renamed it Texas Tech University and made six schools colleges.

What the plaque says

Home Management House Program, School of Home Economics At the end of the nineteenth century, home economics began as an organized social movement, eventually leading to the formalization of home economics as an academic unit within U.S. colleges and universities. Several programs built practice and demonstration cottages, known as home management houses, that were well equipped with the latest household technologies. In January 1928, Texas Technological College's School of Home Economics opened a Home Management House (often called the Home Practice House or Practice Home). The Practice Home residency course proved so popular, the school modified its schedule to allow more students to enroll. In 1936, when Lubbock resident Willie Hinsley died delivering her ninth child, Barbara (d. 2022), Barbara's father agreed with a suggestion by Dr. M.C. Overton and program director Suzanna "Sannie" Callan for the home's resident students to temporarily raise the child. Barbara lived at the home for three years, with approximately 52 students caring for her. "Practice babies" continued with more children, mostly infants of Texas Tech students and faculty. Later practice babies did not live at the home full time, returning to their parents on nights and weekends. By 1951, 18 children had been practice babies. In 1959, Texas Tech was estimated to be among the less than one percent of home economics degree-granting programs utilizing practice babies in their home management house program. In the early 1960s, the program evolved into daytime-only care for the children of students and was discontinued by the late 1960s. After the home management house residency program ended by 1972, the renovated cottage remained an essential component of the School of Home Economics. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Ranching Heritage Center — 0.9 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Buddy Holly Center — 1.7 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 2.8 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 2.9 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• St. John's United Methodist Church — steps away
• Texas Tech Alumni Association — 0.3 mi
• Texas Tech Judging Pavilion — 0.3 mi
• First Baptist Church of Lubbock — 0.4 mi