DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. September 15, 1883. Right here, on this very ground, something began that Texas would carry for generations.
The University of Texas held its first classes — not in some grand hall of marble and stone, mind you, but in the Temporary Capitol. Two hundred and eighteen original students walked through those doors. Two hundred and eighteen souls ready to shape whatever this young state was about to become.
Now, out of that crowd, fifty-two of them had set their sights on the law. Fifty-two students who wanted to argue, and reason, and stand before courts and say, this is right, and this is wrong, and here is why. So who do you put in front of a room like that?
Well, Texas being Texas, they didn't settle for ordinary. They handed those fifty-two students two men who had already lived whole careers worth of history. First, Oran M.
Roberts — born in 1815, and at the time of those first classes already a man who had served as governor of Texas. Governor. Now he was in a classroom.
That takes a certain kind of dedication to something larger than the office you held. Alongside him stood Robert S. Gould, born in 1826, a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
Between the two of them, those students were getting lectured by men who had governed and judged this very state. You want to talk about a first impression. And here's the part of the story that earns its keep.
Those fifty-two law students didn't disappear into the ordinary. Albert Sidney Burleson walked out of that first class and eventually walked into the office of U.S. Postmaster General, serving from 1913 all the way to 1921.
And then there was Yancy Lewis — who must have found something in those halls he couldn't let go of — because he came back. Came back to teach, to stand in front of a new generation of students, carrying forward what had begun right here on September 15, 1883. That's the thing about first classes.
You can't always tell, standing in that room, what you're actually starting.
What the marker says
The University of Texas held its first classes in the Temporary Capitol at this site on Sept. 15, 1883. Fifty-two of the 218 original students were registered in the Law department. They were taught by former governor of Texas Oran M. Roberts (1815-1898) and former Texas Supreme Court justice Robert S. Gould (1826-1904). Many members of the University's first law class went on to have distinguished careers, including Albert Sidney Burleson, who served as U.S. Postmaster General from 1913 to 1921 and Yancy Lewis, who later returned to serve as a law school professor. (1983)