Concordia Lutheran College

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Concordia Lutheran College

Photographs documenting Concordia University from the Austin Files collection. Concordia University Texas is a private, coeducational institution of liberal arts and sciences located in northwest Austin, in the U.S. state of Texas. In the late nineteenth century Texas Lutherans of the Missouri Synod determined to build a local school to prepare their own young men for the ministry. After three short-lived attempts to establish such a college, in New Orleans in 1883, in Giddings in 1894, and at Clifton in the early twentieth century, they succeeded after World War I with the founding in Austin of Lutheran Concordia College of Texas, the name by which the school was known until 1965, when it became Concordia Lutheran College. In 1921 the Texas district requested the Missouri Synod to establish and maintain the institution. The school opened as a boys' secondary school—modeled after the German Gymnasium—preparatory for the ministry. The first president, Dr. Henry Studtmann, remembered that the district chose Austin because it was beautiful, it was the capital city, and especially because the University of Texas was located there. In 1925 the synod's board of directors and the district's board of control purchased twenty acres at the northern city limits, two miles from the Capitol and one mile from the university. The next year they laid the cornerstone for the first building, Kilian Hall. This structure was named after Rev. John Kilian, who led 500 Lutheran Wends to America from Prussia and Saxony in 1854. Its architecture, designed by the firm of Harvey P. Smith and Arthur Fehr, won an award from the Architects' Guild of Texas. The building features a pink Spanish tile roof and hand-carved front doors made by Austin artist Peter H. Mansbendel. Classes began in Kilian Hall on October 26, 1926.

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Concordia Lutheran College

[Concordia Lutheran College Auditorium]

[Concordia Lutheran University]

[Kilian Hall-Concordia Lutheran College]