Paul Whitfield Horn

Horn finished high school at fourteen and earned an M.A. from Central College at eighteen, the Handbook of Texas says. Before Lubbock he led the Sherman schools, then took the Houston schools to national recognition, chiefly by bringing in the junior high school plan. He was a vice president of the National Education Association and surveyed the schools of Portland, Oregon, in 1917 and El Paso in 1921. He spent a year heading the American School Foundation in Mexico City, wrote Our Schools Today (1908) and Best Things in Our Schools (1914), and is buried in the Lubbock cemetery.

What the plaque says

Paul Whitfield Horn When Texas technological college, now Texas Tech University, was created in 1923, the board selected longtime educator Paul Whitfield Horn as its First President. Horn was born in Boonville, Missouri to George Washington Horn and Mattie Myers. He graduated with a master's degree in education and began a teaching career. He married Sallie Maud Keith in 1890, and their only child, Ruth, was born two years later. The Horns moved to Texas in 1892, where Paul served as principal of schools at Valleyview for one year, then superintendent of schools at Belcherville for two years. Every few years, he accepted increasingly prestigious positions, eventually serving as president of the Texas State Teachers Association in 1910. In 1922, he was selected as the sixth president of Southwestern University. It was from here that the newly-formed Texas Tech board hired him as their first president. Horn and his family arrived in Lubbock on December 6, 1923, and quickly got to work. He oversaw all aspects of the building and growth of the college. He was not in favor of Greek fraternities and sororities because he deemed them exclusive, which ran contrary to his vision of an institution where all students regardless of creed or background could fit in. He did support student clubs and athletic programs, especially football, which helped raise the college's profile. He experienced controversy around academic freedom near the time of the famed scopes monkey trial, as local clergy accused tech professors of teaching evolution. The controversy dragged on, leaving Horn to act as referee. At the age of 64, Horn died on April 11, 1932. In the words of Texas Tech student newspaper The Toreador, "President Horn has finished his work, but his spirit lives on forever!" (2022)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• American Windmill Museum — 1.5 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.
• Buddy Holly Center — 2.2 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.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 4.8 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.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 6.2 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

• Bradford Knapp — steps away
• Willie Lusk Jr. — 0.9 mi
• Mary & Mac Private School — 1.1 mi
• Lubbock Cotton Club — 1.2 mi