The Southern German Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church opened Mission Institute in Brenham on 28 March 1883, to train ministers for its own mission field. In 1889 it was renamed Blinn Memorial College for the Reverend Christian Blinn of New York, whose gift had built its main hall. For fifty years it was a Methodist church school, and when the church withdrew its support in 1933 the people of Brenham ran it privately for four years more. What made it unusual came in 1937. On 8 June that year the voters of Washington County approved a county wide junior college district, which the Handbook of Texas records as the first in the state. A private Methodist college became a public one, and Blinn has been county owned ever since. The building the campus grew around came from a different kind of money again. Old Main was finished in 1906 at a cost of about 28,000 dollars, and by the Handbook of Texas's account Andrew Carnegie contributed almost half of it. The two dates are often run together into a single claim that Blinn is the oldest county owned junior college in Texas, founded in 1883. Both halves are true and they describe different things. The school dates from 1883. The county district dates from 1937, with fifty years of Methodist schooling and four of local private management in between.
Getting there
30.1596, -96.4055
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