Washington Square

🏛️The era

Nacogdoches is one of the oldest towns in Texas, with roots reaching back to the Spanish colonial era. By the time Texas became a republic, it was already an important East Texas community. In the 1840s, the town's ambitions for higher learning took shape in the Nacogdoches University, and Washington Square became its home and a center of the town's life.

At the start of the twentieth century, East Texas was still largely rural. It was a land of piney woods, small farms, and timber and railroad towns. Opportunities for higher education were limited. For many young people, a college education meant leaving the region, if they could afford it at all.

Across the United States in the early 1900s, states expanded public education at every level. High schools became more common, and states built teachers colleges to train the teachers those schools badly needed. Texas created several of these regional teachers colleges to bring training closer to where students lived.

Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College was one of them. Named for the father of Anglo-American Texas, it opened in 1923 in Nacogdoches to serve the young people of East Texas. That opening put an old town square at the center of a brand-new institution.

👥People & events

The drama of this marker is a very practical one: a college ready to open, and a campus that wasn't ready yet. In 1923 the buildings on the new college's 208-acre campus weren't finished. President Alton W. Birdwell had students coming and nowhere to put them, so he turned to the people of Nacogdoches for help.

Help came through friendship. R. F. Davis, the superintendent of the Nacogdoches schools, had been Birdwell's roommate at the University of Texas. Davis opened up the school district's buildings on Washington Square to the new college: the high school, the grammar school, and the old stone fort that the marker describes as once located on the square.

So the first Stephen F. Austin students, most of them from East Texas, began their college careers in the "Old University Building," walking in the footsteps of the Nacogdoches University students of generations before. For most of that first semester, the college students and faculty shared space with Nacogdoches High School. Picture it: high schoolers and brand-new college freshmen crowding the same halls, sharing classrooms and schedules.

The square became the hub of campus and social life, and the college began weaving itself into the town. The new campus was completed in 1924, and on April 30 of that year students and townspeople gathered in the high school auditorium for a final program. Every 1924 graduate of Nacogdoches High School went on to college, a remarkable figure for East Texas at the time. It hints at how much having a college in town had lifted everyone's sights.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story of Washington Square is a small version of something that happened all over the United States in the early twentieth century: the spread of public higher education to regions that had never had it. Regional teachers colleges trained the teachers who staffed a growing system of public schools, and many of them grew into the comprehensive universities that serve millions of students today.

It's also a vivid example of town-and-gown partnership. Colleges don't only arrive in communities; they're built with them. Here, a school district, a superintendent and a whole town made room, literally, for a new college. The goodwill of that first semester became, in the marker's words, a lasting tradition of cooperation.

Finally, the square links two eras of American education. The Nacogdoches University of the 1840s reflected the Republic of Texas's early hopes for learning on the frontier, and the teachers college of 1923 reflected the Progressive Era's belief in public education as a path to opportunity. On Washington Square, those two ambitions share the same ground.

🧭If you visit

Washington Square is an easy, rewarding stop for anyone exploring Nacogdoches, a town that proudly celebrates its long history. Stand near the marker and picture the fall of 1923, with college students and high schoolers mixing on the same grounds, all of them unsure how this unusual arrangement would work.

Look for the Old University Building, the link between the square's nineteenth-century university days and the college's first semester. As you walk, think about how many generations of students have passed through this one patch of ground.

From here it's natural to visit the Stephen F. Austin campus itself, the home the college finally moved into in 1924, and to wander the historic downtown with its many other markers. Nacogdoches works well as the center of a Piney Woods road trip through deep East Texas.

For families, this is a great spot to talk about first days of school, and about what it would have been like to start college in borrowed classrooms next to a high school.