Tucson wanted the asylum money and got a university it saw as second prize
In 1885 Tucson lobbied for Arizona Territory's mental hospital, worth $100,000. Floods held up its delegates, rivals carved up the plum institutions, and the town was handed a $25,000 university instead. Nobody would donate land until two gamblers and a saloon keeper offered 40 acres. That consolation prize now enrols over 54,000 students.
The territorial legislature that approved the school earned the nickname the "Thieving Thirteenth". Its decision followed years of pressure after the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862. Tucson's legislators were delayed by flooding on the Salt River, and by the time they reached Prescott the back-room deals had been struck. Arizona State University was chartered the same year, but as a normal school for teachers rather than a university.
Building began on Old Main on October 27, 1887, and the first classes met there in 1891 with just 32 students. Because the territory had no high schools, the university ran its own preparatory classes for its first 23 years. Recognition came in 1924, when the Association of American Universities admitted it under president Cloyd Marvin; Vivian Cox became its first African-American professor in 1967.
Much of today's campus look traces to the Tucson architect Roy Place, whose red brick in buildings such as the 1927 main library became the house style. His early-1930s master plan updated one drawn up in 1919 by his partner John Lyman, modelled on the University of Virginia. The main campus covers 380 acres with 179 buildings, and much of it is an arboretum; the Krutch Cactus Garden holds the tallest Boojum tree in the state, and many olive trees planted by Robert H. Forbes are over a century old.
The Student Union Memorial Center, rebuilt between 2000 and 2003, is shaped like the battleship USS Arizona. Its clock tower holds one of two bells recovered from the ship after Pearl Harbor, a 1,820-pound bell that reached campus in July 1946. For decades it rang seven times at 12:07 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month, until the Navy, which still owns it, asked in December 2020 that it be spared further wear.
Source: University of Arizona
