3-ton Haynes Ring Replica bears Class of '46 Aggie's name, year

One of Aggieland’s most famous landmarks is a 3-ton replica of the Aggie Ring bearing the name and Class year of a ’46 Aggie. It was dedicated on an Aggie Ring Day in 2009 and dreamed up by a Class of ’76 Aggie, who thought it could become a good spot for taking photos.

Pictured here on their wedding day in 1945, Reta Haynes and the late Harold J. “Bill” Haynes ’46 began their married life together on the A&M campus, actually living in the area that is now Aggie Park, near the replica of Bill’s Aggie Ring.

They met in 1944, just before Bill left to join the U.S. Navy during World War II, and after a long-distance romance, they were married in March 1945. Upon their return to A&M, they lived in a Quonset hut in “Veterans’ Village,” an area of prefabricated homes put up temporarily to house the influx of returning Aggie students and other veterans enrolling under the GI Bill.

“We made the amazing discovery that our hut must have been very close to (or right on) the spot where the bronze replica of Bill’s Aggie Ring now sits,” Reta Haynes writes in a family memoir.

The Class year on top and the name engraved inside the 6,500-pound Aggie Ring are those of Bill Haynes, honoring the couple’s many gifts to A&M, which include scholarships and the Reta and Bill Haynes Coastal Engineering Laboratory.

Since its unveiling Sept. 18, 2009, the Haynes Ring Replica has become one of Texas A&M’s most-photographed spots.

That’s exactly what Michael J. Havel ’76 envisioned when he had the idea for the Haynes Ring Plaza during an Association of Former Students board meeting. “I took off my Ring and I said, ‘You know, what we need is a great big Aggie Ring like that, sitting out there on a patio out back, that everybody can take pictures around,’” Havel said.

The artwork was created by Deep in the Heart Art Foundry (now Pyrology Foundry and Studio) in Bastrop, whose work includes the Texas capitol’s Vietnam Monument.