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STRINGER: Tarleton, father of a university
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Dr. Tommy Stringer
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A popular fiction writer of the late 19th century was Horatio Alger. His books, which dealt with the theme of “rags to riches,” described boys who rose from humble circumstances and through hard work and persistence achieved success. A real life example of such an individual was John Tarleton. Born in 1811 in Vermont, Tarleton was orphaned at age 7. He lived with an unmarried aunt until he was 11, when he left home permanently. He eventually arrived in Knoxville, Tenn., which became his home for the next 40 years.
Tarleton ultimately owned a mercantile store there and accepted payment from customers in the form of land patents. Veterans of the War of 1812 who received land grants for their military service lacked currency, and used their land patents to pay Tarleton for goods and services from his store. About 1860 Tarleton headed west to claim the land from those patents, which amounted to thousands of acres in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas. He came to Texas in the late 1860s, settling first in Waco. He married a widow there, but the marriage lasted only a year. Shortly thereafter a man who knew Tarleton kept large sums of cash on hand tried to poison him. After recovering, Tarleton confronted the man but did not press charges. Given those two negative experiences, he left Waco and headed for open pasture lands near Stephenville in Palo Pinto and Erath counties. There he added to his already extensive land holdings, which included at one time as much as 10,000 acres.
As he neared the end of his life, Tarleton prepared his will with the help of Stephenville attorney J.C. George. When he died in 1895, Tarleton’s will provided a $100,000 bequest to endow an institution of higher learning in the Stephenville area. The trustees whom Tarleton named in his will acquired the property of Stephenville College, a small private institution established in 1893. As often was the case with such schools, Stephenville College struggled from the outset. After transferring the property, John Tarleton College opened in 1899. In 1908, due to declining enrollment, college officials reorganized the school as a junior college.
Financial problems continued to plague the college. So when in 1916 the Texas Legislature proposed the establishment of a West Texas agricultural and mechanical college, Tarleton’s trustees offered their properties to serve as that campus, and the state accepted the offer. Tarleton operated as a two-year college until 1959 when the Legislature made it a four-year institution. Graduate programs were added in 1970, and the state designated it as a university three years later.
Today Tarleton State University, endowed by a transplanted New England rags-to-riches character, has an enrollment of 7,000 students.
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Dr. Tommy Stringer is executive director of the Navarro College Foundation.
Click here to e-mail Dr. Tommy Stringer.
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