The departments which became the College of Engineering and Architecture at Washington State University were in place when the school opened in 1892, with the first graduates in 1897. In 1946, a reorganization established the Washington State Institute of Technology as the entity which included the academic departments such as the College of Engineering, the School of Mines, the Division of Industrial Research and the Division of Industrial Service. The Institute was again reorganized in July 1966 into a College of Engineering with academic departments, a Research Division and a Technical Extension Service. In 1984, it was redefined as the College of Engineering and Architecture.
The materials in this collection are mostly secondary sources created by people within the College of Engineering, documenting the history of the WSU college, its subsidiary departments, and specific pieces or things tied to the program. They were collected within the department, effectively as a form of college history vertical file. Some primary source documents are included, mostly in folders 9, 10, 11, and 14, tied to the 1940s reorganization of the programs as the Institute of Technology.
Do note that in the container list below, the dates are the date of publication or creation of the items within it, and not merely the dates written about in those documents.
The collection has been reordered into a subject-based system, with those subjects organized alphabetically. Within each individual folder, items remain either in their original order, or else have been sorted into a chronological order.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions may apply.
[Item description]
Washington State University College of Engineering and Architecture Histories, 1943-2013 (Archives 430)
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
Tina Hilding, Communications Director in the WSU College of Engineering, donated this collection to the Washington State University Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) on March 24, 2026, where it was retained without an accession number.
University Archivist Mark O’English processed this collection in April of 2026.
Photographs from this collection are being processed separately. A number of
individual departmental publications from this material were incorporated into the
Washington State University Publications, 1891-2018
The MASC hold many sets of papers tied to the College of Engineering or its subsidiary departments; we suggest you search the University Archives page of collection guides for these.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.