West Texas State Normal College for teacher education was authorized in 1909 by the Texas legislature. Twenty-five towns competed for the institution, and Canyon was selected. The college achieved university status in 1963. Today, student enrollment is over nine thousand, and the curriculum is broadly based.
The Main Building was designed in 1914 by Endress and Watkin in a neutral classical style with pilasters rather than full orders. George Endress taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and William Ward Watkin of Houston later became a professor of architecture at the Rice Institute and campus planner to Texas Tech (LK17) at Lubbock. Georgia O’Keeffe taught here from 1912 to 1914 and from 1916 to 1918, when she painted in the Palo Duro Canyon.
The Main Building was followed in 1928 by the Education Building, designed by Emmett F. Rittenberry in a compatible mode. In the 1930s the college embarked on an ambitious building program entrusted to Macon O. Carder of Amarillo. He designed the Agriculture/Nursing Building (1942) and the Library (1950–1951; now a part of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum). Although less interesting architecturally than the museum, these modernist structures define the formal campus plan, symmetrically bracketing Main Building. In 1946, Carder designed a Student Union across 24th Street (Victory Drive) from the original campus. Here, although a certain formality cannot be denied, the ceremonial entrance is offset by an asymmetrical building mass, reinforcing asymmetry as an operative principle of postwar modernism. Adjacent to the museum is the reconstructed T-Anchor Ranch headquarters, a two-pen dogtrot log structure. The roughly squared logs have half-dovetail joints, and an outhouse and a storage building give a semblance of a ranch’s facilities.