Wichita Falls Junior College

Under Travis White, president from 1955 to 1974, Midwestern University set up tenure and an honors program, and oil companies drew on its School of Petroleum and Physical Sciences. Costs outran local revenue, and a drive led by Senator George Moffett put the school in the state system in 1961; it became Midwestern State in 1975. Enrollment passed 2,800 in 1964 and reached 4,300 by 1981. President Thomas Barker's Advance Midwestern campaign raised $1.8 million for scholarships and endowment, and a fine arts building and theater opened in 1976.

What the plaque says

Although private junior colleges were operating in Texas before the 1900s, similar public institutions were not started until the 1920s. The first, Wichita Falls Junior College, began here in 1922, seven years before the adoption of related state legislation. Developed as part of the city school system under the direction of Superintendent Randolph Lee Clark, it opened with fifty-five students, ten teachers, and a curriculum of seven subjects. Early classes were held in the high school building at this site. Planning for a separate junior college campus began in 1928 when Burkburnett educational philanthropists John G. Hardin and his wife Mary offered a matching grant for construction of new facilities. Despite the economic depression of the 1930s, the necessary funds were raised and another site was donated by local residents W. B. Hamilton and N. H. Martin. Renamed Hardin Junior College in honor of the school's benefactors, the institution was relocated by 1938 when the new buildings were completed. In the 1940s the school became a state-supported four-year college. Renamed Midwestern University in 1950, it has been an instrumental factor in the growth and development of Wichita Falls. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kell House Museum — 0.2 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 0.8 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 12 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 18 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• Times Publishing Company — 0.4 mi
• Kemp Public Library — 0.4 mi
• First County Officials — 0.6 mi
• Texas Governor James V. Allred — 0.6 mi