Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College During World War II
Nacogdoches, Nacogdoches County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Immediately following the United States' entry into World War II after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College (SFA) President Alton Birdwell called together an assembly of students and staff to address the national emergency. Many students and faculty members responded to the call to arms by entering every branch of the armed services, and a county civil defense council, with many SFA leaders, worked on the homefront. Among the homefront efforts was a concerted program to maintain active correspondence with those serving in the military overseas. In addition to the male SFA military and homefront volunteers, many SFA women entered military service. Student enrollment fell by 60% during the war and the resulting scarcity of men, coupled with travel restrictions, forced the school's athletic council to suspend intercollegiate football. In February 1943 the U. S. Army selected SFA as the first college in the nation to host the women's Army Corps Training School. At the height of the war, a flag made by students was displayed on campus. It bore more than a thousand blue stars for SFA students and staff serving in the war, and 24 gold stars for those who lost their lives in service to their country. Ultimately, more than three dozen SFA students died in military service. Many students attended school on the G. I. Bill after the war, resulting in a surge in enrollment and construction of new campus buildings. The college's recreation facilities were renamed "Memorial Park" and "Memorial Stadium" in honor of those who served and died in the war. Students and faculty have continued to serve the U. S. military in times of peace and war. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, the president of Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College gathered students and faculty to meet the national emergency—and the campus emptied into the war. Enrollment fell by sixty percent, football was suspended, and a campus flag bore more than a thousand blue stars for those serving and twenty-four gold ones for those who died. In a notable distinction, the Army chose SFA in 1943 as the first college in the nation to host a Women's Army Corps training school. After the war, returning veterans on the G.I. Bill swelled the college and its recreation grounds were rededicated as Memorial Park and Memorial Stadium.
Why it matters
The story of one Texas teachers' college shows how totally World War II reshaped American campuses—draining them of students, drawing women into uniform, and then rebuilding them through the G.I. Bill.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the fall of 1941, Nacogdoches was a small East Texas college town where a state teachers' college trained the region's future schoolteachers. Life on a campus like Stephen F. Austin's ran to a familiar rhythm—classes, chapel assemblies, and football Saturdays—and the wider anxieties of a world already at war still felt an ocean away.
That changed in a single December morning. When Japanese planes struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered World War II, the distance collapsed. Overnight, a college whose business was preparing young people for civilian careers found itself part of a nation mobilizing for total war.
East Texas answered the way small-town America did everywhere: with enlistments, ration books, scrap drives, and civil defense councils staffed by the same people who ran the schools and churches. A teachers' college, with its pool of educated and organized young adults, was well positioned to pour its people into both the armed forces and the home front.
People & events
The turning point on this campus had a face and a moment. SFA's president, Alton Birdwell, called students and staff together in an assembly to speak to the national emergency—a scene that captures how leaders across the country tried to steady their communities and point them toward service in those first uncertain weeks.
What followed drained the campus. Students and faculty entered every branch of the armed services; many SFA women put on uniforms as well, part of a wartime expansion that, for the first time, brought American women into military service in large numbers. Enrollment fell by roughly sixty percent, and with so few men left and travel restricted, the athletic council suspended intercollegiate football. Those who stayed kept up a steady correspondence with classmates serving overseas—letters that were, for many a soldier, a lifeline home.
The cost was made visible in cloth. A service flag made by students hung on campus bearing more than a thousand blue stars, one for each person from SFA in uniform, and twenty-four gold stars for those who had died. By war's end more than three dozen SFA students had lost their lives in service.
Its place in the American story
Multiply this one campus by the hundreds of colleges across the country and you have the story of American higher education in World War II: classrooms emptied, sports and traditions paused, and institutions retooled to serve the war effort. SFA carried a particular distinction—in February 1943 the Army selected it as the first college in the nation to host a Women's Army Corps training school, a small but telling marker of how completely the war reshaped who belonged in uniform.
The war's end reshaped campuses just as forcefully. The G.I. Bill sent a wave of returning veterans to college, many the first in their families to attend, and enrollments surged past their prewar peaks. Schools like SFA answered with new buildings, and the postwar campus—larger, older, more serious—was in many ways built by that generation.
The rededication of the college's recreation grounds as Memorial Park and Memorial Stadium reflects a national impulse of the late 1940s: to fold remembrance into the fabric of everyday places, so that the games and gatherings of peacetime would carry the names of those who did not come home.
If you visit
Stand on this part of the SFA campus and try to picture it nearly emptied—two of every three students gone, the football field quiet, a hand-sewn flag of a thousand stars hanging where everyone would pass it. The marker asks you to see an ordinary college through the lens of an extraordinary interruption.
Let the names do their work. When you come across "Memorial" attached to a stadium or a park here, remember it is not decoration; it is a deliberate act of honoring students who left these grounds and did not return. The gold stars on that wartime flag stood for real young people from this town and this school.
Nacogdoches bills itself as the oldest town in Texas, so this stop fits naturally into a day of layered history in the Piney Woods of East Texas. It's a good place to slow down and consider how a war fought across two oceans reached all the way into one small college's classrooms, playing fields, and mailboxes.
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
- · Alton Birdwell
Related events
- · World War II
- · Attack on Pearl Harbor
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Women's Army Corps School
Nacogdoches, TX
When World War II drained young men — and students — from campuses across the country, the U.S. Army turned college classrooms into training grounds for its newest recruits: women. With enrollment at Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College fallen below 500, the Army opened Administration School No. 1 here in 1943 to teach members of the Women's Army Corps the clerical and administrative trades of a modern military. Housed in the dormitories and drilled in six-week courses, roughly 3,000 women passed through before the school closed in 1944, each graduating class thanking the town with a variety show at the high school.
Birdwell Field, Aikman Gym and the Women's Recreation Center
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When Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College was funded in 1921, the legislature paid for only one building—the Austin Building, or "Old Main." President Alton W. Birdwell, convinced the young college needed more, arranged its first athletic field in 1923, even before the campus moved to North Street. Over the following decades the college added Aikman Gymnasium, a 3,500-seat multipurpose hall given by philanthropist Frank Aikman, and a Women's Recreation Center built in 1935 with Public Works Administration help, which doubled as a WAAC post exchange during World War II. Memorial Stadium later replaced Birdwell Field, honoring the college's WWII dead.
Paul Lewis Boynton
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Paul Lewis Boynton, a Texas-born psychologist trained at Peabody College, became president of Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College in 1942 just as World War II drained its male students away. To keep the school alive he persuaded the federal government to open a Women's Army Corps training school on campus in 1943 and secured surplus buildings and land that launched a forestry department in 1945, then guided a surge of postwar enrollment until his sudden death in 1958.
Karle Wilson Baker
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From the early 1900s, the East Texas town of Nacogdoches was home to Karle Wilson Baker, one of the state's most celebrated writers. Arkansas-born and college-trained, she first published a poem in Harper's in 1903 and went on to become the most frequently published poet in the Yale Review, with collections issued by Yale University Press. Dubbed "The Poet of Quiet Things," she wrote poems, essays and historical novels set in East Texas, saw her 1931 collection nominated for a Pulitzer, and taught for a decade at Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College, for which she wrote an early school song.