Site of Texas Wesleyan College

A Swedish Methodist college was first proposed at a meeting of Methodist ministers in Waco on June 15, 1907. Olander found twenty-one acres at Wheelers Grove in north Austin for $6,300, ground now under the University of Texas law school. The cornerstone was laid on August 27, 1911, and the college, named for John Wesley at Olander's suggestion, opened on January 9, 1912, with fourteen students. The Olanders also ran the Sunnybrook Dairy, which gave work to Swedish students. Tobacco and profanity were forbidden, chapel was required every morning, and Clyde Littlefield coached the men's basketball team.

What the plaque says

Site of Texas Wesleyan College Founded by Swedish Methodists, with leadership and guidance from the Rev. O. E. Olander, Texas Wesleyan College opened in 1912. Numerous academic courses were offered in the school sponsored athletic teams, a newspaper, and music, and literary clubs. It was closed in 1940, in the 21-acre site and buildings were sold to the University of Texas. The funds were transferred to Texas Woman's College in Fort Worth (later renamed Texas Wesleyan College) and the Texas Wesleyan foundation, which provided hundreds of scholarships to Texas students of Swedish heritage. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LBJ Presidential Library — 0.2 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• Harry Ransom Center — 0.6 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.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.7 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.
• Texas State Capitol — 1.1 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• John Elbridge Hines — 0.4 mi
• Rebecca Kilgore Stuart Red — 0.5 mi
• Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary — 0.5 mi
• Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Campus — 0.5 mi