St. Philip's College (original site)

Artemisia Bowden, who ran this school for fifty-two years, was the daughter of former slaves. Born in Albany, Georgia, in 1879, she graduated from St. Augustine's Normal School in Raleigh and taught in North Carolina before coming here in 1902. When the Episcopal Church stopped paying for the college in the Depression, she kept it open herself and pressed the school board to take it over, arguing that the city owed Black residents a public junior college as long as it ran one for White students. The board finally agreed in 1942, and she stayed on as dean.

What the plaque says

St. Philip's College (original site) Opening at this site in 1898 as "St. Philip's Saturday evening sewing class for black girls", this college was found by the Rt. Rev.James Steptoe Johnston (1843-1924), Episcopal Bishop of western Texas, who considered education a tool toward solving race problems. Soon coeducatinal and in a brick building of its own, it was renamed St. Philip's industrial school, and was taught by Mrs. Alice G. Cowan,a white missionary with prior service in Mexico. In 1902, Miss Artemisia Bowden (1879-1969), a black lady from Georgia, assumed administrative and teaching duties, servingfor 52 ensuing years. Broadened by literary courses in 1903 and with teacher training added, the facility in 1906 became the St. Philip's normal, grammar, and industrial school. A new, expandable site was bought in 1917, and St. Philip's moved to Dakota Street, 2 miles east of this site. Elevated to a junior college in 1927, and in public control since 1942, it is now a part of the San Antonio Union Junior College District. In 1955, it became reacially inegrated. The enrollment has risen from 21 in 1899 to more than 8,000 today. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Antonio River Walk — steps away
  A Depression-era park one level below downtown, built because San Antonio refused to pave its river after the 1921 flood, and designed by an architect the project later fired.
• La Villita Historic Arts Village — steps away
  The little village across the river from the presidio, where Cos surrendered San Antonio in 1835, rebuilt by Depression-era youth crews as a working crafts village.
• The Alamo — 0.3 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.
• San Fernando Cathedral — 0.4 mi
  The Canary Islanders' parish church on Main Plaza, where Bowie married and Santa Anna raised a red flag, rebuilt in Gothic Revival around the walls of the 1750s church.

More markers nearby

• John W. Smith — steps away
• The Pajalache Acequia (Ditch) — steps away
• El Quartel (El Cuartel) — steps away
• Site of the Home of Dr. Ferdinand Ludwig Herff — steps away