North Central Texas College is celebrating its 85th anniversary in 2009. The history of this institution is indeed a long one—the longest in fact of all 50 public community colleges in Texas (more about that HERE). Why is NCTC’s history important? We believe that to truly understand and appreciate where North Central Texas College is today and where it’s going in the years to come, it’s important to take a look back at where we’ve been. 

The story begins early in that turbulent decade known as the Roaring Twenties. Calvin Coolidge was our president. More and more folks were listening to what was still a relatively new gadget—radio. And for students at Gainesville High School, a new doorway to opportunity had recently opened right in their own hometown. All they had to do was walk up to the top floor of GHS (housed then in the converted Newsome-Daugherty mansion) to begin their college education.

Gainesville Junior College, like many of the earliest junior colleges in Texas, was, in the beginning, an extension of the local public schools, and it was the brainchild of a man now recognized as a true pioneer of public community college education in Texas—Randolph Lee Clark. Born in Fort Worth, Clark came from a family of strong believers in higher educaiton. His father and uncle, in fact, founded Add-Ran College, the forerunner of Texas Christian University.

After graduation from Add-Ran, and a stint as a cowboy on the famous XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle, Lee Clark accompanied a trainload of cattle to Chicago and there continued his education at the University of Chicago. His mentor was Dr. William Raney Harper, the university president and the man known as the father of American community colleges. He exerted a huge impact on young Mr. Clark’s views on higher education.

After returning to Texas, Clark married and served briefly on the staff of a small church school in Midland. He moved to Wichita Falls in 1915 to become superintendent of the public schools, a post he held for the next eight years. Several of those years Clark spent campaigning to add a junior college to the rapidly growing public school system in Wichita Falls. He helped pass a bond issue which built a building to house both the high school and Wichita Falls Junior College—the second publicly supported municipal junior college to be established in Texas. It opened in September 1922. A few years later, Lee Clark’s first junior college became a four-year institution known as Hardin College, and today it is known as Midwestern State University.

Young Lee Clark was apparently a young man of strongly held opinions who had little patience with persons who did not see things his way. Unfortunately, one those persons turned out to be a member of the school board, and Lee Clark soon found himself seeking employment elsewhere. That elsewhere turned out to be Gainesville, Texas, where he came in 1923 as new superintendent of the public schools. He wasted little time in setting about to sell the citizens of Gainesville on the merits of starting their own junior college.

Dr. C. R. Johnson, founder of the Gainesville Kiwanis Club, soon joined Lee Clark’s junior college bandwagon, and he brought his fellow Kiwanians along with him. It was at a meeting of the Kiwanis Club that Lee Clark, invited by Dr. Johnson as a guest speaker, publicly planted the seed for a new junior college and cited all its many advantages. The college, he said, would function easily enough in the newly remodeled high school. It would simply require the addition of several teachers and improvements in lab equipment. With nine children of his own to educate, one might say Lee Clark had a vested interest in promoting junior colleges. Every one of his kids went to college.

The junior college bandwagon, pushed along by the Kiwanis Club, really took off in the spring of 1924. First, the president of the Gainesville School Board issued a public endorsement. Then the Gainesville PTA and other civic clubs held a joint meeting to drum up support. Lee Clark reportedly stirred the emotions of all present by citing, quote, “the moral hazard of sending students away from home” to go to college.
Lee Clark and his supporters next made an appeal to the Gainesville City Council, asking its approval of the addition of a junior college to the school system.

The city council officially created Gainesville Junior College at its regular meeting on May 20, 1924. Take a minute sometime and visit the historical marker out in front of the campus which commemorates the pioneering work of NCTC’s founder. By the way, despite some arguments from a few other institutions, North Central Texas College is indeed the oldest continuoulsy operating public two-year college in Texas. And we have another historical marker to prove it, thanks to the great work of Professor Ron Melugin, NCTC’s official historian.

By the fall of 1924, Lee Clark’s new vision for a local public two-year college had become a reality, and Gainesville Junior College enrolled its first class—32 students in all. One of them was a rangy, red-haired farm boy named Fay Hemphill, shown here as a member of the college’s very first basketball team, the Bluebirds—a mascot soon abandoned because... well, it didn’t sound quite macho enough. The college also fielded a football team, known as the Tigers, in those early days. While you’re looking around the college website, check out Professor Melugin’s history of ALL the different college mascots over the years.

Inspired by Lee Clark and chemistry professor Hubert Moss, Fay Hemphill—or “Red” as he was known to his classmates—was a popular student and a natural leader. He served as “sophomore circulator” for the yearbook staff and as president of Gainesville Junior College’s very first graduating class.

Dr. Faye Hemphill went on to pursue his own highly distinguished career in the fields of both higher education and public health. His research helped uncover links between early incubators and infant blindness. He also worked on research which helped Dr. Jonas Salk develop the world’s first effective vaccine for polio. How fitting it is that the college has named its annual Distinguished Alumni Award in honor of the late Dr. Fay Hemphill.

Sharing not only classroom space but also administrators—like H.O. McCain and W.E. Chalmers—Gainesville Junior College continued for a number of years to be operated as an extension of the local public schools. It also shared teachers with the high school. It was not until 1957 that a group of teachers was assigned full-time duty as members of the college faculty.

And for many years, the high school and college continued to be housed together in the old Newsome-Daugherty mansion on Lindsay Street, shown here in an aerial view. The structure had previously been the home of United States Senator Joseph Weldon Bailey who narrowly missed capturing the democratic nomination in the Texas gubernatorial race of 1920. For the next two decades, the mansion accommodated both Gainesville High School and Gainesville Junior College very nicely. Incidentally, the present-day Gainesville High School occupies the very same plot of ground on which the old mansion stands in this photograph.

However, back in the 1940s, college enrollment continued to grow, and by 1946, the college found itself needing more room to accommodate the many veterans returning home from World War 11, ready to use their G.I. Bill benefits to finance their college education. So, the school board acquired a frame structure located adjacent to the high school on a plot of ground now occupied by the Gainesville High School auditorium. (You can see the building in the lower right-hand corner of the aerial view.) For the next 12 years, it housed junior college offices, a modest student lounge, and the first college library collection. It was the first building Gainesville Junior College could truly call its own.

By the late 1950s the college had grown to the point where sharing space with the high school was no longer practical, and local citizens approved a bond issue to build separate facilities. In short order, local voters were also asked to approve the creation of a junior college district, separate from the public schools, as well as a tax to support it.

Then as now, opinions about taxes were divided, and the proposition was defeated in initial balloting. But, with support from citizens like W.T. Bonner, who spoke out in a newspaper survey, the voters gave their approval in a subsequent election.

Mr. Bonner did more than just voice his support. He and his wife donated five acres of land on what was called Black’s Hill west of town to help kick off construction of the new building. Here, the Bonners help turn the first spadeful of dirt at groundbreaking ceremonies while President John Parker looks on. The NCTC Board of Regents commemorated the Bonners’ contributions by naming of the college’s first Residence Hall. located on Bonner Road, in their memory.

Purchase of an additional 45 acres from Mr. Bonner by the new college district’s first board of trustees made way for creation of the large, modern physical plant which still serves as NCTC’s main campus today. Their foresight and vision and that of administrators like John Parker, for whom the NCTC Planetarium is named, truly paved the way for the future.

Enrollment at the college has grown steadily over the years, and reaching the 1,000 mark truly was quite a milestone back in 1965. But enrollment growth at NCTC in recent years has been nothing short of extraordinary. Since the 1980s, our student population has almost quadrupled to a current total of more than 6,000 students. Over the next decade, growth in student numbers up to 10,000 or more system-wide is a very real probability.

But let’s not get ahead of our story. As it was for the entire nation, the 1960s and 70s were a period of transition for the college as well. Now separate from the public schools, and occupying its own growing campus, then Cooke County Junior College went about establishing its identity as a “real” college—one of a growing number of publicly supported junior colleges across the state.

From those modest beginnings nearly eight decades ago, North Central Texas College has clearly undergone a lot of changes. Our most recent name change we’ll talk more about shortly. But one thing remains unchanged—a philosophy we hope we will never outgrow. It goes back to the earliest days of Gainesville Junior College and teachers like Mary Josephine Cox, whose devotion to her students reached far beyond the classroom. To this day, the MJ Cox estate continues to provide the largest single source of scholarship funding at North Central Texas College.

Similar legacies were left in later years by teachers like Cora Staniforth, who taught classes for the college for over 40 years, and more recently by longtime English professor and department chair Dr. Ona Wright, who with her husband Ed have established two fully endowed scholarships for NCTC students. They all believed, as we still do, that the most important people on our campuses are our students.

Now we’re up to the eighties. We’re now known as Cooke County College, having dropped the “junior”—but, truth be told, we were still pretty much a sleepy little rurally-based junior college at heart. Then the calendar turned to the nineties, and things REALLY began to change.

College administration recognized that if Cooke County College had any hope of becoming a truly comprehensive public community college of regional scope and significance, a name like Cooke County College was a definite handicap. So, then president Dr. Ronnie Glasscock and the college’s visionary governing board set about leading a comprehensive public education campaign among district residents for a name change. A number of county residents weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea at first. But most of those who spoke out against the name change back then—now point to it as probably one of the shrewdest decisions the college’s governing board ever made in terms of securing the college’s future.

During that time, college officials also spent a lot time in Austin in an extensive lobbying effort which resulted in statutory designation of community college service areas throughout the state—something which had previously been decided, very ineffectively, by “gentlemen’s agreement” among the various college presidents. NCTC’s service area of Cooke, Denton and Montague counties had become a matter of state law.

And—on June 1, 1994—the Board of Regents made it official too, unanimously voting to change the college’s name from Cooke County College to North Central Texas College.

Among other things, that has helped NCTC become a key provider of quality workforce education and training throughout the region, providing services to a wide array of business and industry. And that makes North Central Texas College a vitally important and significant player in economic development—not only within Gainesville and Cooke County but throughout the entire 1-35 Corridor linking southern Oklahoma to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

Ever since the name change, growth and change at North Central Texas College have continued to gain momentum. Our modern campus at Corinth demonstrates our intention to extend top quality teaching and services to students at all sites throughout the service area.

Our beautiful Bowie Campus, built and maintained by the citizens of that city, stands as a monument to the extraordinary benefits that can come of partnerships forged between the college and the public sector.

For now, however, all eyes are back on the Gainesville Campus, where already several components of a comprehensive Facilities Master Plan are being translated into brick and mortar. Keep in mind that many of the buildings on this campus are now 35 to 40 years old. Several are really beginning to show their age—to the point, in fact, that we will very soon simply have to replace them. So, take a good look at the campus as it looks today—new construction and renovation have already begun a transformation process that will change that look considerably over the next few years.  The most recent addition is our beautiful new, state-of-the-art Career and Technology Center, slated for formal opening and dedication in September 2009.

With every passing day at North Central Texas College and at each of our campuses, growth continues to occur. And with it, there’s more history in the making. So, buckle up-it—promises to be a wild and exciting ride into the new millennium.