Old Main: Where Texas State Began

That redbrick Gothic building crowning the hilltop is Old Main, and it is older than the university itself. In eighteen ninety-nine, San Marcos leaders lobbied the Texas Legislature hard enough to win a new normal school for training teachers, and the city sweetened the deal by donating an eleven-acre hilltop called Chautauqua Hill. Old Main was finished in nineteen oh three, and the first students climbed that hill to find turrets, limestone trim, and arched windows modeled after the main building at Sam Houston State.

What started as the Southwest Texas State Normal School grew into Texas State University, enrolling more than forty thousand students today. Old Main still stands at the center of it all.