Midland Christian College

The college began with a 1908 meeting of Texas Christian University trustees, who wanted a junior college in West Texas and saw promise in Midland, where ranch families from hundreds of miles around kept homes so their children could attend school. Citizens chartered it on January 19, 1909, and donated a 225-acre site; selling 300 parcels of it paid for the building. The three-story brick hall, with Corinthian columns, opened in 1910 with 107 students. A scarlet fever epidemic closed it for a month in 1912. After 1921 it moved to Cisco.

What the plaque says

Midland Christian College 2 blocks west to site of Midland Christian College A 2-year, coeducational college that functioned 1910-1921. H. R. Garrett was first president. Students rode horse-drawn bus to campus; edited yearbook, "The Sandstorm." Some 250 attended in 1917. Financial stress forced closure. The 3-story gray brick building was later razed. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of the Southwest — 0.6 mi
  Midland's art and science museum in the 1937 house of oilman Fred Turner and his wife Juliette, with added galleries, a children's museum and a planetarium on the grounds.
• Bush Family Home State Historic Site — 1.0 mi
  The small 1939 frame house on West Ohio Avenue where George and Barbara Bush raised their young family in Midland's 1950s oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 1.3 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 7.4 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Midland — 0.9 mi
• George Bush Family Home — 1.0 mi
• First Christian Church of Midland — 1.2 mi
• Midland National Bank — 1.4 mi