Midland Christian College
Midland, Midland County, Texas
Marker Inscription
2 blocks west to site of Midland Christian College A 2-year, coeducational college that functioned 1910-1921. H. R. Garrett was first president. Students rode horse-drawn bus to campus; edited yearbook, "The Sandstorm." Some 250 attended in 1917. Financial stress forced closure. The 3-story gray brick building was later razed. (1970)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
For a brief decade beginning in 1910, the raw new railroad town of Midland supported its own two-year coeducational college, headed by first president H. R. Garrett. Students rode a horse-drawn bus to the three-story gray brick building, edited a yearbook wryly named 'The Sandstorm,' and numbered some 250 by 1917. Financial strain forced the doors shut in 1921, and the building was eventually torn down.
Why it matters
Midland Christian College captures the ambitious, often fragile push to plant higher education on the West Texas plains in the early twentieth century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1910, Midland was a raw young town on the flat, wind-scoured plains of West Texas. It owed its existence to the railroad — it had grown up as a stop on the Texas and Pacific line running between Fort Worth and El Paso, roughly midway between the two, which is how it got its name. This was ranching and dryland-farming country, big sky and bigger distances, and the oil boom that would later make Midland famous was still more than a decade away.
Into that unlikely setting the townspeople decided to plant a college. It was an act of pure ambition. Communities all across the newly settled West believed that a town with a college was a town with a future, and they were willing to build lecture halls out on the plains to prove it.
For a brief, hopeful decade, Midland had exactly that.
People & events
Midland Christian College opened its doors in 1910 as a two-year, coeducational school, with H. R. Garrett serving as its first president. Picture the daily commute: students rode to campus on a horse-drawn bus, crossing a town that was still half-frontier to reach a three-story building of gray brick rising over the prairie.
The life of the place was recognizably that of a real college. Students edited a yearbook, and they gave it a name that shows they had both humor and a clear-eyed sense of where they lived — they called it “The Sandstorm.” By 1917 some 250 students were enrolled, a genuine crowd for so young a town.
But ambition alone could not pay the bills. Financial stress mounted, and in 1921 the college was forced to close after just eleven years. In time the gray brick building itself was torn down, leaving the school to live on only in memory and in markers like this one.
Its place in the American story
The rise and fall of Midland Christian College is the story of higher education on the American frontier told in fast-forward. As settlers pushed west, they carried with them a conviction that learning belonged out here too, not just back east — and they founded hundreds of small colleges, many of them church-affiliated, to make it so.
Many of those schools were fragile. They ran on tuition, donations, and hope, with little endowment to cushion a bad year, and a great number opened bravely and closed quietly within a generation. Midland's college was one of them. Its failure was not a lack of will but the hard economics of building an institution faster than a young community could sustain it.
That these towns tried at all is the point. The impulse to put a college on the plains, even one that lasted only a decade, is a window into how deeply Americans tied education to the promise of a place.
If you visit
Be prepared for an act of imagination, because there is nothing left to tour. The marker points two blocks west to the site, but the three-story building is long gone, razed years ago. What you are visiting is an absence — a patch of a now-large city where an audacious little college once stood.
That is its own kind of powerful. Stand near the spot and picture the horse-drawn bus, the wind carrying grit against the brick, the students bent over the pages of a yearbook they named for the storms. It asks you to see the town as it was before the oil derricks and the modern skyline.
Modern Midland has plenty to explore, and this quiet marker makes a thoughtful first stop. It reframes the whole city: before this was the capital of the Permian Basin, it was a dusty railroad town that wanted, more than almost anything, to be a place of learning.
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
- · H. R. Garrett
Themes & tags
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