Clarendon College

Two colleges, both known as Clarendon College, have operated at sites in Clarendon. The first, established in 1898 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and administered as a junior college until 1926, was followed in 1927 by the present Clarendon College, a nonsectarian, state-supported, two-year college.

A Methodist minister, Rev. W. A. Allen, conceived the idea for Clarendon College in 1879, when he established Allenton Academy at old Clarendon. When the town moved to its present site on the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway in 1887, local citizens offered the Northwest Texas Methodist Conference four acres of land and promised to build a two-story building to relocate the college. Church leaders made it clear that they would build only if saloons were eliminated from the town. Rev. J. R. Henson, a local Methodist minister, led a campaign, which succeeded by 1902, to clear out the saloons in Clarendon's Feather Hill section and vote Donley County dry. In 1898, when the town's population was 2,756, construction began on the three-story building that housed president, administration, teachers, and students on Clarendon's ten-acre campus. The institution, known as Clarendon College and University Training School, was accepted by the conference and opened in the fall of that year with four teachers and twenty-one students. Classes were offered in all grades, and primary and intermediate departments existed until 1923. J. W. Adkisson, the first president, was followed by W. B. McKeown, J. Sam Barcus, G. S. Hardy, J. Richie Mood, G. S. Slover, R. E. L. Morgan, S. H. Condron, and, in 1984, Kenneth D. Vaughan.