In fact, the first building ever inhabited by the school wasn't even located on the present-day campus.

The infirmary at Fort Hays, a former army post that had been abandoned in 1889, was where 57 students paid a tuition fee of $5 for the first summer courses in 1902. The stone guardhouse down the path at what is now Historic Fort Hays served as the gymnasium.

The school's first leader, William S. Picken, actually was in favor of keeping the college on the site of Fort Hays. But a group of townspeople, spurred by real estate interests, wanted to move the college closer to the city of Hays.

And so the move began in 1904, but not before a prairie dog town had to be removed from the land where the college's first building on that site, Picken Hall, was under construction.?