Historic Walker County

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Above: A map of Walker
County Texas.
Below: The Roberts-Farris Cabin was
built in the mid-1840s and is now
located in downtown Huntsville to
help keep history alive.
COURTESY OF MEREDITH AUSTIN.
groups and formed a minority affairs committee.
Over the course of the following decades,
diversity on the campus increased
tremendously, and students now enjoy being
part of a variety of groups including the
Mexican American Student Association and the
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. 102
Student activism at SHSU became
pronounced in 1971, when Huntsville’s young
people registered to vote in record numbers and
even helped elect a student to city council. This
increased activity had at its heart a single issue:
the sale and consumption of alcoholic
beverages. Historically, Huntsville had been a
conservative city that prohibited the sale of
alcohol. In December 1971, however, the
students forced through a referendum that
legalized the sale of alcohol, and soon beer
could be purchased at convenience stores and
restaurants throughout the city. 103
Ten years after the repeal of local prohibition,
another symbol of Huntsville’s past fell in a blaze
of glory. The architectural treasure of SHSU, ‘Old
Main,’ had been constructed in 1890. It was an
immense Gothic-style structure adorned with
twenty-three stained glass windows, and it
served as the iconic image of the school.
However, in the predawn hours on February 12,
1982, a fire broke out in the building. SHSU
History Professor, Ty Cashion, captured the
dramatic scene poignantly, when he wrote, “a
stunned crowd, many in tears and holding their
hands over quivering mouths, gathered as the
inferno consumed the tinder-dry wooden
interior of the doomed monolith.” With the
destruction of Old Main, a new image of SHSU
was designed by Presidents Bobby K. Marks and
James F. Gaertner, who transformed the school
from a rural, East Texas teaching college into a
4 8 ✦ H I S T O R I C W A L K E R C O U N T Y