Texas Tech University and the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources have finalized plans to renovate the historic Dairy Barn.
Steven Fraze, Ph.D., CASNR interim dean, said the plans for the Dairy Barn will include a conference area in the upstairs loft, partitioned rooms for group meetings on the first floor and there will be a museum where the milking parlors once existed.
“For students, there will be club meetings and all sorts of things,” Fraze said. “There will be a couple of offices and a conference room that we will put a couple of individuals from the college in, just to have people in the building,.”
The renovations are expected to take place as soon as the college meets the quota the Office of The President has made.
The price tag on the renovation is $2.6 million. The President’s Office will match half of the bill. The other half will come from alumni and donors.
The expected time frame for the renovations is a maximum of two years. Fraze said the contractors are hoping for less time, but there are a lot of repairs that need to be made.
Lynn Whitfield, university archivist in the Texas Tech Southwest Collection/ Special Collections Library, said the Dairy Barn is one of the four original buildings on Tech’s campus.
The Texas Tech Historic District is centered on the administration building, which was built to show that Tech was going to be a magnificent institution. The elaborate detail in the building’s design set the ideal look for the college going into the future.
“The Dairy Barn, on the other hand, is at the very far end of the historic district, and it represents the roots of this area, the agricultural roots; the farming roots and the ranching roots,” Whitfield said. “So, when you look at it today, and how both structures have withstood time. It’s our roots and our future that are tied together.”
The barn was used as work-study for students to earn tuition money through dairy product sales while attending Tech until it was abandoned in 1964.
In fear of the Dairy Barn being torn down in the early 1990s, Tech’s Student Government Association and other student organization groups fought to get the barn marked as a national historic landmark.
Today, the Dairy Barn is a state and federal place of historic importance.
With the plans finalized for the Dairy Barn, Fraze, believes it will create a welcoming area for more traffic to localize by the barn.
“It’s right in the center of campus, so it is very centrally located and it would just be something that would put good use to the building,” Fraze said.
If you wish to contribute to the Dairy Barn Renovations please visit http://donate.give2tech.com/?fid=T24G202.