Lamar University: The Junior College That Grew Up

On September seventeenth, nineteen twenty-three, one hundred twenty-five students climbed to the third floor of the new South Park High School building and began classes at South Park Junior College. The faculty numbered fourteen. The president of the college was also the district superintendent. The dean was also the high school principal.

The institution had been authorized just six months earlier, when the South Park Independent School District decided that Beaumont needed post-secondary education it could reach without leaving the city. It was a municipal act of faith, arriving twenty-two years after the oil boom had reshaped the local economy.

The college grew steadily through the Great Depression, partly because students who might otherwise have left for Austin or College Station now stayed. In nineteen thirty-two it was renamed Lamar College, in honor of Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, who had championed public education as the foundation of the republic's future.

Lamar was Lamar College through the nineteen forties and into the fifties, building its campus and expanding its curriculum. In nineteen forty-nine it became a four-year institution. In nineteen fifty-one it received accreditation. In nineteen seventy-one, the Texas legislature made it official: Lamar University.

The university now enrolls roughly seventeen thousand students, operates a College of Engineering and a College of Fine Arts and Communication, and is part of the Texas State University System. It hosts the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum on its southern edge.

What began as a practical decision by a school district, to keep its own students close, to invest in local education over distant prestige, became, across a century, a university. The original third-floor classroom is long gone. The aspiration that put students there has had a reasonably good outcome.