The Gift
Please click below for exhibit audio orated by Dr. Thomas H. Kreneck, Archivist and former Director of Special Collections and Archives at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi
Conrad’s crowning beneficence came in 1975, when he and his wife Zula E. Hill Blucher donated their estate to Texas A&I University at Corpus Christi. (Located on Ward Island, A&I-Corpus Christi was the public university which had once been the Baptist institution named the University of Corpus Christi. In turn, A&I-Corpus Christi would become Corpus Christi State University which subsequently changed its name to Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.)
By the end of the year, Conrad and Zula had signed over their home on Ocean Drive to the A&I-Corpus Christi Foundation, while retaining a life’s estate. The sale of the house was to be used for the creation at the University of the “Conrad Blucher Fund for the Advancement of Science and Technology.” The initial use of this fund was to establish a teaching professorship called the “Blucher Chair of Surveying.”
Amid much publicity, President Halladay accepted the gift as the University’s first endowment at a ceremony honoring the Blucher couple in January 1976. The fund, Halladay noted, would further the instruction of engineering technology.
Evoking the Blucher tradition, Halladay stated: “Conrad Blucher has spent his lifetime, as did his forefathers, in advancing the profession of engineering in South Texas.”
What largesse came as a result of this bequest after Conrad and Zula died in 1977 and 1985, respectively (Zula having retained a life’s estate), was South Texas ranch land, its oil producing mineral rights, and various other possessions that benefitted the University.
The fund totaled around two million dollars and continued to grow into a multi-million-dollar principal.
This endowment made possible the establishment of the “Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science” (or the CBI) on what by then was the Corpus Christi State University (CCSU) campus.
Dedicated in May 1987, the Blucher Institute had as its stated purpose: “To emphasize the importance of surveying research and education.”
Truly, the gift made by Conrad and Zula Blucher represented a continuation of the Blucher surveying spirit that had begun in Corpus Christi in 1849, and reflected the Blucher respect for education that started with Conrad’s forebears in Prussia.
To learn more about the Conrad Blucher Institute, and the work that this generous gift has enabled over the last 35 years, please visit https://www.conradblucherinstitute.org/
