Wesley College Administration Building

Wesley College came to Greenville because local Methodists persuaded the Greenville Development Company to offer a campus site and cash. Trustees accepted in May 1912, and it opened on September 17, 1912, with sixty students. The Handbook of Texas says it offered six years of study from elementary level through two years of college and kept about 500 students and fifteen instructors. By 1926 it owned a 75-acre demonstration farm and 3,000 books. Weak Depression funding and poor business management by several presidents undermined it, and it closed after the 1937-38 term.

What the plaque says

Wesley College Administration Building After its operation by North Texas Conference of the Methodist Church in Terrell (Tex.) in 1905-11, Wesley College moved here 1912. This administration building, erected 1914-15, burned in the 1920s but was rebuilt by the church and faithful laymen. Incise in base: Erected by Alumni and Ex-students Association. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 1.9 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 23 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 31 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Library Movement in Greenville — 1.0 mi
• Wesley United Methodist Church — 1.4 mi
• Lallie P. Carlisle — 2.0 mi
• Greenville's Electric Light Plant — 2.0 mi