The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 54, July 1950 - April, 1951 Page: 396
544 p. : ill., ports., maps. (some col.) ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Miller Dam was given the University by Regent George W.
Brackenridge of San Antonio. Eleven years later, looking for-
ward to the growth of the institution and buoyed by the belief
that a further gift of several million dollars from Brackenridge
was in sight, the regents, in 1921, voted to move the entire Uni-
versity to the Brackenridge tract. A storm of protest resulted,
not only from property owners near the Forty Acres but also
from former students who loved the old campus. A bill was
passed by the legislature appropriating $1,350,000 for the pur-
chase of additional land north and northeast, east and southeast
of the Forty Acres to provide for expansion.
In 1925 the legislature gave the University the land and build-
ings of the former Blind Institute on East Nineteenth Street. In
1930 the James Cavanaugh homestead south of Twenty-first Street
along Waller Creek was acquired; in 1931 the grounds of the
Texas Wesleyan College east of Waller Creek known as East
Woods, and the property on Whitis Avenue along the residence
of the Episcopal Bishop of Texas, George Herbert Kinsolving.
Other lots have been purchased or given from time to time.
The total of these tracts with the forty acres of College Hill
amounts to about 21o acres. In addition on December 29, 1949,
the University obtained title from the federal government to
nearly four hundred acres with approximately twenty-six build-
ings thereon, that constituted the wartime magnesium plant a
few miles north of Austin. To the Main University, further, are
attached away from Austin the four hundred acres of the McDon-
ald Observatory on Mount Locke in Jeff Davis County and the
eleven acres of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Nueces
County.
Buildings at the Main University. The first building, always
known as the Main Building, designed in the Gothic style by
F. E. Ruffini, was built in three sections and served all purposes.
The west wing was completed in 1883, the central part in 1889,
and the east wing in 1899. Because of its dimensions and its
location on the top of the hill in the middle of the Forty Acres,
it dominated all North Austin. It was not palatial or fireproof,
but it was roomy. Its wide halls and spacious rotunda brought
students and faculty together to such an extent that when its
destruction was decreed to make an even larger and more im-396
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 54, July 1950 - April, 1951, periodical, 1951; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101133/m1/534/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.