McMurry College

Stamford fought for the college, but Abilene offered money, land, free water and streetcar connections, and its citizens raised $100,000. McMurry opened with twenty-two faculty and staff and 191 students, and its first senior class, of four, graduated in 1926. The Depression imperiled it: faculty took partial salaries, and the college survived on strict economies and federal money from the National Youth Administration and the Work Projects Administration. The Handbook of Texas records that McMurry was the first college in Abilene to admit Black students, in the early 1960s. It became McMurry University in 1990.

What the plaque says

Between the years 1840 and 1920, the Methodist church founded nearly eighty colleges in Texas. Four colleges in the Northwest Texas Conference had closed for various reasons by 1920, when the Reverend James Winford Hunt was appointed commissioner of a new college to be built in Abilene. James Winford Hunt (1875-1934) published newspapers in Lubbock and Plainview before becoming a Methodist circuit rider minister in 1903. He was called to St. Paul's Church in Abilene in 1914, where he served for two years before becoming president of Stamford College. Returning to St. Paul's when Stamford closed in 1918, he resigned in 1920 to promote the establishment of a new college. Garnering overwhelming community support, a fund drive was launched in March 1921, to coincide with a visit from the conference presiding Bishop, William Fletcher McMurry. In April the church Board of Education elected trustees, appointed Hunt president, and named McMurry College in honor of the bishop. A charter was filed with the state on November 26, 1921, and construction began in 1922. The faculty was chosen the following spring, and the school officially opened on September 19, 1923. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 1.8 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 — 11 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 — 15 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 — 16 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

• Company I, 7th Texas Infantry — 0.9 mi
• Childers Classical Institute — 1.4 mi
• 45th Infantry Division at Camp Barkeley — 1.5 mi
• Taylor, Edward, James, & George — 1.5 mi