Hunter Gymnasium
Marfa, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1940, Marfa received a Works Progress Administration (WPA) grant of more than $15,000 to help build a new gymnasium named to honor athletic director Boren Hunter. The modified rectangular plan building features plastered adobe infill walls, a rare earthen material in buildings of this type. Other elements include concrete for pilasters and a continuous perimeter footing, and steel for open web roof trusses. A projecting entry steps down to the athletic court. The facility has been used for numerous school and community activities, figuring prominently into the lives of generations of students and citizens.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1940 the town of Marfa won a Works Progress Administration grant of more than $15,000 to build a new gymnasium, named to honor athletic director Boren Hunter. Its builders used plastered adobe infill walls — an unusually traditional, earthen material for a structure of this kind — combined with concrete pilasters and steel roof trusses. For generations the gym anchored school games and community gatherings alike.
Why it matters
The gymnasium is a tangible legacy of New Deal public-works spending, which brought lasting civic buildings — and jobs — to small towns across Depression-era America.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1940, the country was slowly climbing out of the Great Depression, and the fingerprints of the New Deal were everywhere — including in small West Texas towns like Marfa. Federal work-relief programs had spent the 1930s putting Americans back to work by building the things communities needed: roads, schools, courthouses, parks, and gymnasiums.
Marfa sits high on the arid plateau of far West Texas, ranching country where towns were small and public dollars were scarce. For a place like this, a substantial new public building was a genuine event — and rarely possible without help from beyond the county line.
That help came in the form of a Works Progress Administration grant of more than $15,000, awarded in 1940 to build a new gymnasium. It was a sum that could transform a school and a town, and it did.
People & events
The new gymnasium was named to honor Boren Hunter, the athletic director whose name it still carries — a fitting tribute that tied the building to the people who filled it with games, practices, and school pride.
What makes the building genuinely unusual is how it was made. Its modified rectangular plan was built with plastered adobe infill walls — earthen construction that was rare in buildings of this type. Adobe was an ancient material of the Southwest, and to see it in a 1940 public gymnasium is to watch old regional building traditions meet modern needs.
The builders combined that traditional earthen material with distinctly modern elements: concrete for the pilasters and a continuous perimeter footing, and steel for the open web roof trusses that spanned the playing floor. A projecting entry steps down to the athletic court. The result was a hybrid — regional and modern at once — and it went on to host countless school and community activities, figuring into the lives of generations of Marfa students and citizens.
Its place in the American story
The Hunter Gymnasium is a tangible piece of one of the largest civic-building efforts in American history. Through the Works Progress Administration and its sister programs, the federal government funded tens of thousands of public projects across the country during the Depression, leaving behind schools, auditoriums, and gymnasiums that many towns still use today.
The genius of the WPA was that it did two things at once: it put unemployed Americans to work, and it built lasting public infrastructure that small communities could never have afforded on their own. A gymnasium like this one represents both halves of that bargain — jobs during hard times, and a durable civic asset for the decades that followed.
It also shows how national programs took local form. Federal money paid for it, but it was built of West Texas adobe by local hands, named for a local man, and woven into the specific life of one town. Across America, the New Deal left thousands of such buildings — each national in origin, each unmistakably rooted in its own place.
If you visit
Look closely at the walls, because they hold the surprise: plastered adobe, an earthen material you'd expect in a mission or an old ranch house, used here in a twentieth-century gymnasium. Set that against the concrete pilasters and the steel roof trusses overhead, and you can read the whole design philosophy in a glance — tradition and modernity built into the same structure.
Notice the projecting entry that steps down to the athletic court; it's a small architectural gesture that shapes how you move into the building and down toward the floor where so many games were played.
Think, too, about everything a small-town gym like this holds: basketball games, assemblies, graduations, community gatherings — generations of a town's shared life under one roof. In a place as storied and photogenic as Marfa, the Hunter Gymnasium is a quieter, more human landmark, and a rewarding stop for anyone curious about how the New Deal reshaped everyday America.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Boren Hunter
Related events
- · Works Progress Administration
Themes & tags
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