University of Arizona / Old Main

Tucson got a university before it got a state. In 1885, the Territorial Legislature founded the University of Arizona — thirteen years of mining and ranching and borderland violence, a city of adobe and ambition. The townspeople offered 40 acres of donated land on the eastern edge of town, and Phoenix architect James Miller Creighton drew plans for a building they'd call Old Main.

Construction began on October 27, 1887. The budget was $37,969. It ran out before they finished the roof.

University officials, hunting federal funding, renamed the building from its original School of Mines designation to the School of Agriculture. The money came through. On October 1, 1891, Old Main opened to the university's first class: 32 students, six faculty, one building holding every classroom, every office, the library, the dorms. The whole enterprise under a single roof, out on the territorial edge.

By 1938, Old Main had fallen into disrepair — condemned by the city, slated for demolition. The US Navy intervened in 1942, repairing the building for use as a Naval Indoctrination Training School during the war. When the Navy was done, they paid $20,000 in 1945 to hand it back as a functioning campus building.

The school they kept alive grew into a national leader in planetary science — ran the Phoenix Mars Lander, flew OSIRIS-REx to an asteroid and back. Old Main, listed on the National Register in 1972, was renovated in 2014 and now houses the Office of the President. Out front stands the Alexander Berger Memorial Fountain, completed in 1920 as a memorial to thirteen University of Arizona students killed in World War I. General John J. Pershing dedicated it on January 31 of that year.

The building is still the centerpiece, still the thing you see first — the place where Arizona decided it wanted more than mines.