City Building
Alpine, Brewster County, Texas
Marker Inscription
City Building. Erected in 1893. Oldest public school building standing in Alpine. Abandoned as school in 1910. Later served as a hospital, college dormitory, Border Patrol station and U.S. Agricultural and Soil Conservation Service. Recorded Texas Historical Landmark. 1965.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Erected in 1893, this building is the oldest public school structure still standing in the far-West Texas town of Alpine. It served students only until 1910, then lived several later lives—as a hospital, a college dormitory, a Border Patrol station, and an office for federal agricultural and soil conservation work. Recorded as a Texas Historical Landmark in 1965, it traces the growth of a remote frontier community.
Why it matters
Its long chain of reuses mirrors how a small frontier town's needs evolved, from educating its first children to housing the federal presence that came with the twentieth century.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Alpine
Alpine, TX
When the railroad reached this spot in 1882, a spring-fed settlement sprang up that would soon be called Alpine. Missionaries followed the settlers, and in 1893 the First Baptist Church of Alpine was formally organized, worshipping in an adobe sanctuary by 1896. As the congregation grew alongside the town and its new teachers' college, it filled community gaps — running a borrowing library where there was no public one and supporting scouting, youth, and mission work.
J.C. Carr-Bob Slight House
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Early settler J.C. Carr built this house in 1884 using the time-honored Southwestern method of laying double adobe-brick walls at night so they dried slowly to great strength. In 1903 it passed to Judge R.B. Slight, an English law clerk who had come west to be a cowboy after watching Wild West shows, and who added five adobe rooms and lived here for half a century. A rancher, merchant, and civic leader, Slight helped found what became Sul Ross College.
First Rural School West of Pecos River
Fort Davis, TX
In 1881 settlers P. H. Pruett, Cal Nations, James Dawson, and Joe Dorsey raised this adobe schoolhouse, said to be the first rural school west of the Pecos River. A nearby Texas Rangers' camp shielded the families from Apache raids, and Mrs. Pruett once rode at midnight to warn the Rangers of approaching Apaches. When Pruett sold his home in 1883 and moved to found the Lone Cottonwood Ranch, the school closed.
Blackwell School
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From 1889, children of Mexican descent in Marfa were schooled apart from their Anglo peers, first in a former Methodist church and later in this thick-walled adobe building named for principal Jesse Blackwell. Generations of Hispanic students learned here under an English-only rule so strict that Spanish words were symbolically 'buried' in a mock funeral. The school closed in 1965 when Marfa's schools integrated, and preservationists have since worked to save it.