New Mexico State University

The university you're passing was born before New Mexico was a state. In the fall of eighteen eighty-eight, a Quaker educator from Indiana named Hiram Hadley opened Las Cruces College in a two-room building. The next year the territorial legislature created a separate land-grant college nearby under the Morrill Act, called the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, and the two schools merged.

The merged school reopened in January of eighteen ninety with thirty-five students and six faculty. It survived drought, territorial politics, and two world wars before the state constitution formalized its present name in nineteen sixty. Today New Mexico State is the oldest public university in the state, and the only one with a land-grant mission dating to the territorial era.