Althea School
Bartlett, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Thompson F. Fowler and his family were among the earliest permanent settlers of this area. A rural community which built up around the family-owned cotton gin became known as Fowler's Gin. A community school, established about 1894, was consolidated with the nearby Alligator School in 1897 to form Fowler Common County Line School District No. 111. In 1900, the community was granted a United States Post Office under the name Althea. Although the post office closed four years later, the school was re-named Althea School in 1908. A new schoolhouse built in 1910 was destroyed by fire in 1916. Althea was consolidated with other area schools in 1917 to form the New Hope School District. Althea withdrew from the consolidation in 1926, however, and remained an independent school until its final closing in 1942. The Althea School building was sold in 1945, and the school was officially annexed to the Bartlett School System in 1948. Although sporadic in its periods of operation, Althea School provided educational opportunities to generations of rural schoolchildren. (1991)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This rural school grew out of the cotton-gin community of Fowler's Gin, whose first classes met around 1894 before consolidating with a neighboring school. Renamed Althea in 1908 after the short-lived local post office, it weathered a schoolhouse fire in 1916, a merger, a defiant withdrawal from consolidation in 1926, and finally closed in 1942. For half a century its doors opened and shut with the fortunes of the farm families around it.
Why it matters
The one- and two-room country school was the heart of rural America, and Althea's stop-and-start history shows how thousands of such communities fought to keep education close to home before consolidation swept them away.
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Related people
- · Thompson F. Fowler
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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