Oct. 10, 1879 was the first day of classes at Sam Houston Normal Institute, Texas’ third tax-supported college and the first devoted to training teachers.

With the end of the post-Civil War occupation and the restoration of popular rule in 1874, Texans finally turned their attention to the long neglected issue of education.  Gov. Richard Coke cited the lack of “a sufficient number of educated and trained teachers,” a void the handful of small private institutions of higher learning could not be expected to fill.  Nearly everyone agreed on the pressing need for a public college that specialized in teaching teachers to teach, but the problem was how to pay for it.

Help came from a most unlikely source.  In 1867 New England philanthropist George Peabody established a foundation for the purpose of improving education in the conquered Confederacy.  The Peabody Fund offered $6,500 toward the creation of a normal or teachers college in Texas on condition the legislature come up with a matching amount.

Austin not only met the fiscal challenge but also provided free tuition, room, board and laundry for two students from each senatorial district and six more from the state as a whole.  In return these “state students,” selected by competitive exams, would teach in the public schools back home for as many years as they received the generous scholarship.

Huntsville was selected as the site not so much for geographic convenience but because the building that once housed Austin College, which had relocated to Sherman, was vacant and available.  Four instructors welcomed 100 students to Sam Houston Normal Institute in October 1879.

For the next two decades, the Huntsville normal struggled to satisfy the rising demand for teachers, but that was asking too much of a single school in a state whose population almost doubled between 1880 and 1900.  

Texas was actually losing ground.  Of the 10,120 certified teachers in the mid-1890s, only 623 had college degrees and just 809 had completed the two-year course of study at Sam Houston.  So lawmakers decided in 1899 to add two more normals.

The groundwork for a teachers college in North Texas had been laid nine years earlier by pioneer educator Joshua C. Chilton, who turned the second floor of a Denton hardware store into a classroom.  The private academy soon had separate quarters and a new leader after the founder suffered a nervous breakdown.

The second link in the chain was forged in 1901.  North Texas Normal College was a success from the start and by 1923 was the largest institution of its kind in the Southwest.

The Denton addition was followed two years later by the third in an equally education-minded town.  The citizens of San Marcos donated 11 acres on Chautauqua Hill for Southwest Texas Normal School.

Cecil E. Evans took over as Southwest’s second president and held the job for 31 years.  A father figure with a hands-on approach to running a college, he prided himself on being able to call every student by name.  One of the hundreds he knew on sight was Lyndon B. Johnson, who rented a garage apartment from the head of his alma mater.

When legislators at last okayed a normal for West Texas, 27 towns vied for the prize.  The winner was the Panhandle community of Canyon (population 1,400) which turned the judges’ heads with 45 free acres and a $100,000 pledge.

West Texas Normal College was less than four years old in March 1914, when a fire destroyed the main building.  Classes were held in stores, churches and the county courthouse until teachers and townspeople constructed temporary quarters.  “Not a member of the faculty flinched, not a student left campus,” President Robert Bartow Cousins noted.

The State of Texas bought the fifth normal outright rather than build it from the ground up.  William L. Mayo had been turning out teachers since 1889, first at Cooper and later at Commerce, and by 1910 had 1,400 students on the rolls of the private college he called East Texas Normal College.  Mayo died on May 14, 1917, the very day the House of Representatives voted to accept his irresistible offer and purchase the school.

“Cowboys wearing their boots, spurs and an occasional bandanna registered with a kind of idle curiosity” at the newest teachers school at Alpine in 1920.  Named for the Texas Ranger, Civil War general, governor and president of Texas A&M, Sul Ross State Normal College survived repeated attempts by penny-pinching politicians to shut it down.

Stephen F. Austin Normal College got the official go-ahead in 1917, but a world war and an economic slump postponed the Nacogdoches opening until 1923.  Enrollment topped a thousand the next year, and by the 1960s Stephen F., as it was affectionately known, was among the fastest growing state colleges in Texas.

The eighth and last link in the chain was added in the Rio Grande Valley.  Kingsville beat out Alice for South Texas State Teachers College, later renamed Texas A&I.

Although the normal system is no more, the eight former colleges are alive and well though four now have unrecognizable names.  Their combined enrollment at the turn of the century was 96,400 ranging from a high of 27,000 at Denton and a low of 2,800 at Alpine.

Bartee’s three books (“Texas Depression-Era Desperadoes,” “Murder Most Texan” and “Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil”) and his 10 column collections are available on his web site barteehaile.com