First University Building

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best by every word. Now, if you ever want to understand how something big got its start, you go looking for the moment somebody took a risk on a piece of ground. And Denton, Texas, in 1891, that was exactly one of those moments.

A man named Joshua C. Chilton had already been at it for a year. He'd opened a school called the Texas Normal College and Teacher Training Institute, privately owned, his own undertaking, right there in a business building downtown.

Now, starting a college in a commercial storefront is the kind of move that either looks foolish or visionary depending entirely on what happens next. What happened next is that the city of Denton stepped in. Right here on this very site, in 1891, the city erected a building and leased it to President Chilton, so his college could have a proper home.

Ten acres of campus. Room to grow, room to breathe, room to become something. And become something it did.

In 1901, that ten-acre campus became state property. President Chilton's privately owned college, the one that started in a downtown business building, had laid the foundation for what would grow into North Texas State University. But that original building, the one the city put up in 1891, the one where it all began?

It didn't get a quiet retirement. In 1907, lightning struck it. And it burned.

There's something almost poetic about that: the first building gone in a flash and a fire, while the institution it sheltered went right on growing. This marker was dedicated on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the beginning of that university. Seventy-five years from a leased building on ten acres in Denton to a state university with a history worth marking in stone.

Some things survive the lightning. The building didn't. The school did.

What the marker says

On this site in 1891, the city of Denton erected a building to be leased to President Joshua C. Chilton, for the use of the privately owned Texas Normal College and Teacher Training Institute, which he had opened the year before in a business building downtown. The 10-acre campus became state property in 1901. President Chilton's college thus was forerunner of North Texas State University. The old Normal building was struck by lightning and burned, 1907. This marker is dedicated on the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the university.