Tag: Texas Asylum for the Blind (Austin TX)

Wikipedia says: On August 16, 1856, the Texas Legislature enacted a measure providing for the establishment of a Texas Asylum for the Blind in Austin. The state leased the Neill–Cochran House as a temporary site for the asylum while a permanent campus was constructed. The asylum facility was designed and built by Abner H. Cook, a local architect who had recently designed both the Neill–Cochran House and the Texas Governor’s Mansion. In 1857 the asylum moved into its new campus (now the University of Texas at Austin’s Little Campus), where it operated until the end of the American Civil War in 1865.

After having its facility commandeered by Reconstruction forces for a year, the asylum was reopened in 1866 and occupied its original campus from then until 1915, while the program was renamed the Texas Blind Institute in 1905 and then the Texas School for the Blind in 1915. During World War I the School for the Blind was displaced by a military pilot training program, and it relocated to its current campus in 1917.