St. Edward's University

St. Edward's University in Austin is a Catholic institution whose antecedents go back to the 1870s. It was founded by the Rev. Edward Sorin of the Holy Cross Fathers and Brothers. The congregation, which had established the University of Notre Dame at South Bend, Indiana, in the 1840s, undertook the staffing of a school in Galveston in 1870. Sorin then learned that Mary Doyle of Austin, a widow, wanted a Catholic school established there and was willing to donate her 398-acre farm just south of the city for that purpose. Sorin came to Austin in 1872 and acquired the tract from Doyle and, from Col. Willis L. Robards, an adjacent tract of 123 acres. Two Holy Cross brothers arrived in 1874 to begin working the farm, but it was 1878 before the first class was taught in the Doyle farmhouse. By the fall of 1881 two modest frame schoolhouses had been built on the site. One of them provided dormitory space for boarding students. That year the school was given the name St. Edward's Academy in honor of Sorin's patron, St. Edward, King of England. In 1885 the school was chartered by the state of Texas as Saint Edward's College. In 1889 the campus was moved to its present site, on the Robards tract, where an "Old Main" style of building, designed by Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton, had been built. The Rev. Peter J. Hurth, president from 1886 to 1894, supervised these developments and promoted the growth of the school during his administration. By the early 1900s it had an enrollment of nearly 200 students, most of them boarders from Texas and Mexico.

In 1903 the main building was destroyed by fire and was replaced by the present one, also designed by Clayton. During the generation that followed, the growth of the school was limited by competition from the rising public school system, by some years of poor crops and economic recession in the United States and Mexico, and by the impact of the Mexican Revolution and World War I. Commercial studies continued to hold a central place in the academic program. Other studies included the basics for younger students and the classics, modern languages, writing, literature, and some science for the older ones. The students, most of them between ten and twenty years of age, were classified, as they had been in the past century, as minimi ("minims"), juniors, or seniors, according to age and advancement. In 1921 a clear line was drawn for the first time between the college and the high school departments. The minim department became the subacademy or elementary school. A second major disaster occurred when the Austin tornado of 1922 destroyed a dormitory, did other damage to the school, and killed one student. In 1925 the college was rechartered as St. Edward's University. Faculty and staff in these years consisted mostly of fathers and brothers of the congregation, appointed by the provincial administration at Notre Dame. Administration, teaching, and supervising dormitories and extracurricular activities were their major duties. Sisters of the Presentation, exiled from France by anticlerical legislation, were in charge of the kitchen, laundry, and infirmary of the residential department. They served at the school from 1903 to 1938. The most notable of the few lay persons on the faculty was William J. Disch, coach and physical education instructor from 1901 to 1911. His success led to his being hired by the University of Texas, where he won fame in a long career as baseball coach.