DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the marker tells it, and I'm just along for the ride. There's a building standing at the University of Texas at El Paso that turns heads the moment you lay eyes on it — and the story of how it came to look the way it does is one of those only-in-Texas tales that starts, of all places, with a magazine. This is Old Main.
Completed in 1917, it was the very first structure to go up on the new campus of what was then called the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy — the institution that would one day become the University of Texas at El Paso. Now, a school of mines out in the West Texas desert, you might expect something plain, something practical, something that looked like it had better things to do than be beautiful. And then you see those sloped walls.
That wide, overhanging roof reaching out like it's shading the whole Chihuahuan Desert. That decorative brickwork climbing the facade. None of that happened by accident.
In April of 1914 — three years before the building was even finished — a woman named Kathleen L. Worrell was paging through the April 1914 issue of National Geographic magazine. She was the wife of the school's first dean, and something in those pages stopped her cold.
A feature on Bhutan. A small kingdom tucked into the Himalayas, half a world away from El Paso, Texas. And Kathleen Worrell looked at those images and thought — that's it.
That's what this place should look like. She suggested the Bhutanese style, and somebody actually listened. So when Old Main rose up on that new campus in 1917, it didn't look like any other school building in Texas.
It looked like a piece of the Himalayas had been set down in the desert, brick by deliberate brick. One woman, one magazine, one April issue — and a building that's been turning heads ever since.
What the marker says
Completed in 1917, this building was the first structure on the new campus of the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy, now the University of Texas at El Paso. The Bhutanese style was suggested by Kathleen L. Worrell, wife of the school's first dean, who was inspired by a feature on Bhutan in the April 1914 issue of "National Geographic" magazine. Distinctive features include sloped walls, decorative brickwork and a wide overhanging roof. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982