1.4 A Brief History Lesson about UT Arlington (from Saxon, 1995)
1.4 A Brief History Lesson about UT Arlington (from Saxon, 1995)
The University of Texas at Arlington traces its history back to 1895, with the establishment of Arlington College near the location of the current E. H. Hereford Student Center. At the time, the college’s location was one mile southwest of the city limits of Arlington, a town of only 1,000 residents. Today the university is in a bustling and vibrant metropolitan area, the largest and most populous in the state. The evolution of the school mirrors in many ways the growth and development of the Dallas–Arlington–Fort Worth metroplex, going from a school whose educational programs focused on military school discipline and rural-leaning educational programs to today’s modern, urban, research university striving for national prominence like the region that surrounds and embraces it.
The history of the school can be divided into three distinct periods. The first period dates from 1895–1917, when the various schools that opened onsite were private and intended to offer an alternative to parents who did not want their children educated in public schools. The impetus for opening the first school, Arlington College, came from local Arlington merchant Edward Emmett Rankin. It was Rankin who recruited Lee Morgan Hammond and William M. Trimble, the two co-principals of the then Arlington Public School, to start the private school. The community threw its support behind these efforts, and the school opened in September 1895. From this opening there was a succession of schools on the site, including Arlington College (1895–1902), Carlisle Military Academy (1902–1913), Arlington Training School (1913–1915), and Arlington Military Academy (1915–1917).
In today’s terms, these schools were not colleges at all but rather schools for children in primary, intermediate, and secondary grades. Each of the schools opened with great fanfare but eventually failed when sagging enrollment caused financial and legal problems forcing closure. In the end, the Arlington community proved unable—or unwilling—to provide the necessary support to keep the private schools operating.
The year 1917 marked the beginning of the second period in the school’s development and a major turning point when educator and lobbyist Vincent Woodbury Grubbs led the efforts in Austin to open a junior college in Arlington as an extension of Texas A&M. This idea had been discussed locally for more than a decade, but Arlington leaders only mustered the resources to hire Grubbs in 1917 to work on their behalf. The Texas legislature responded favorably to the idea, passing a bill that Governor James Ferguson signed calling for the establishment of Grubbs Vocational College as a “Junior Agricultural and Industrial College.” In return for the college and the state funding that went along with it, the citizens of Arlington had to donate one hundred acres of “good tillable land” to the state and the “Carlisle Military School property, with all build