Clarendon College
Source: The Handbook of Texas Online
Two colleges, both known as Clarendon
College, have operated at sites in Clarendon. The first,
established in 1898 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and
administered as a junior college until 1926, was followed in 1927
by the present Clarendon College, a nonsectarian,
state-supported, two-year college.
A Methodist minister, Rev. W. A. Allen, conceived the idea for
Clarendon College in 1879, when he established Allenton Academy
at old Clarendon. When the town moved to its present site on the
Fort Worth and Denver City Railway in 1887, local citizens
offered the Northwest Texas Methodist Conference four acres of
land and promised to build a two-story building to relocate the
college.
Church leaders made it clear that they would build only if
saloons were eliminated from the town. Rev. J. R. Henson, a local
Methodist minister, led a campaign, which succeeded by 1902, to
clear out the saloons in Clarendon's Feather Hill section and
vote Donley County dry.
In 1898, when the town's population was 2,756, construction began
on the three-story building that housed president,
administration, teachers, and students on Clarendon's ten-acre
campus. The institution, known as Clarendon College and
University Training School, was accepted by the conference and
opened in the fall of that year with four teachers and twenty-one
students.
Classes were offered in all grades, and primary and intermediate
departments existed until 1923. J. W. Adkisson, the first
president, was followed by W. B. McKeown, J. Sam Barcus, G. S.
Hardy, J. Richie Mood, G. S. Slover, R. E. L. Morgan, S. H.
Condron, and, in 1984, Kenneth D. Vaughan.
Despite financial difficulty, by 1900 the school had a faculty of
eight, property valued at $8,000, and 109 students. The first
interscholastic football game in the Panhandle was played on
December 5, 1903, when the Clarendon College Cowboys defeated
neighboring Goodnight Academy
16 to 10.
After a drop in enrollment in 1914, in 1916 Clarendon College had
the largest enrollment of any junior college in the South. By
1919 the physical plant, with two additional frame dormitories
and a new administration building, was valued at $175,000, and
enrollment reached 350.
The school added its third year of work in 1924 and its fourth in
1925 and was recognized as a four-year accredited institution.
Baccalaureate degrees, awarded only in 1927, went to nineteen
students.
After considering proposals to relocate the college at Amarillo,
the Methodist Church ceased supervision of the institution on
August 15, 1927. School assets, valued at $654,749, were
liquidated, and, on vote of the citizens, facilities were
purchased by the Clarendon school board for the purpose of
establishing a municipal junior college.
In 1928 a vote to require a 20 percent ad valorem tax for support
of the school was passed, and later the seven-member Clarendon
College District voted a similar tax for the school's
maintenance. In the 1960s the college moved to a new location,
the former site of the home of pioneer rancher Thomas Sherman
Bugbee, on a hill west of town.
A new building complex was erected, and during the 1966-67 year,
with a faculty of seventeen, enrollment reached 228. The
college's Pampa Center, housed in Pampa's former Houston
Elementary School, opened in December 1978 for night classes. In
1979 and 1980 vocational nursing programs were initiated with
general hospitals in Shamrock and Childress.
In 1980 the main campus maintained administration and classroom
facilities, a physical education center, a fine arts building, a
vocational-technological center, three dormitories, a cafeteria,
and a library of over 19,000 volumes. During that year enrollment
exceeded 400.
Clarendon College is accredited by the Southern Association of
Schools and Colleges and offers liberal arts and agriculture
studies, as well as business and other vocational training. For
the 1992-93 regular term, enrollment was 957 and the faculty
numbered fifty-five.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Virginia Browder, Donley County: Land O' Promise
(Wichita Falls, Texas: Nortex, 1975). Macum Phelan, History of
Early Methodism in Texas, 1817-1866 (Nashville: Cokesbury, 1924);
A History of the Expansion of Methodism in Texas, 1867-1902
(Dallas: Mathis, Van Nort, 1937). Kate Talley, History of
Clarendon College (M.A. thesis, West Texas State University,
1933).
H. Allen Anderson
(information from The Handbook of Texas
Online --
a multidisciplinary encyclopedia of Texas history, geography, and
culture.)