Established in 1917 as Sul Ross Normal College and elevated to university status in 1969, the campus occupies an amphitheater-like site at the base of a hill. During the 1920s and 1930s two- and three-story red brick buildings were arrayed along a contour line near the crest of the hill so that they seem to float above the town, an illusion compromised by the insertion of multiple surface parking lots along the brow of the hill.
The first building on the campus was the Dolph Briscoe Jr. Administration Building (former Main Building, 1920, Endress and Watkin). Their building set the pattern for subsequent buildings at state colleges in Texas through the 1950s: a wide, three-story, symmetrical, Colonial Revival building of red brick with decorative elements in white-painted cast stone and metal. The Briscoe Building has a flat-roofed central portico supported on four Corinthian columns. Brick wings with window bays divided by white pilasters are framed by projecting end pavilions featuring shallow pediments. The Horace W. Morelock Academic Building (former Library and Education Building) of 1930 by Trost and Trost is similar. And facing south toward W. Holland Avenue is Lawrence Hall (Women’s Dormitory, 1938, Wyatt C. Hedrick). A terraced garden parterre steps down the slope in front of Lawrence Hall on axis with the W. Holland Avenue campus entrance.
Victor J. Smith (1890–1956) was hired in 1919 by the college to supervise construction of the campus’s first two buildings. Smith remained as an instructor in industrial technology until his retirement in 1951. He designed McCoy Hall (1937), originally the Student Union Building, with its red rock sandstone exterior and lamella-vaulted roof. It now houses the Museum of the Big Bend.
The Georgian-styled buildings of Sul Ross seem out of place in the dramatic desert mountain landscape of the Trans-Pecos. The large surface parking lots further erode the campus’s foremost natural asset, its amphitheater-like site.