Crawford Schools
Crawford, McLennan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Educational efforts in Old Crawford (2 mi. E), also known as Tonk Crossing, began in the 1870s. There, John H. Gouldy, Dr. J.B. Cranfill and other early teachers conducted classes in a one-room schoolhouse. When the town relocated here along a line of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe railroad in the 1880s, a schoolhouse was among the first buildings constructed. The one-room structure served additionally as a meeting place for church services and town gatherings. in 1886, the local free school combined with Crawford College, a private operation, to form the Crawford Public Schools. Trustees added two rooms to the schoolhouse, and three teachers taught classes through grade seven. Other grades and facilities were added over the years as the school population increased. Crawford Independent School District formed in 1894, and trustees built new facilities on the city’s western border at this location in 1903. Two years later, a school for African American students began with Mona Boyd as the first teacher. Dramatic growth for the Crawford schools began in the 1920s with consolidations, the start of school bus service and expansion of the main campus. Among the rural schools that merged with Crawford over the years were Bellview, Morgan Branch, Tonk Creek, Prairie Chapel, Center Hill, Osage and Highland. The African American school, located on the southeast side of town, burned in 1951, and students attended classes in McGregor until integration in 1965. From 1947 to 2004, Crawford ISD had just three superintendents, and each provided leadership and consistency to the district’s schools. From pioneer days to the present, residents of Crawford have supported quality education, making it a priority within the community. (2005)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Schooling in the Crawford area began in the 1870s at Old Crawford, or Tonk Crossing, where teachers like John H. Gouldy and Dr. J.B. Cranfill taught in a one-room house that doubled as church and meeting hall. When the town moved to follow the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe railroad in the 1880s, a schoolhouse was among its first buildings, and the merging of a free school with private Crawford College in 1886 laid the foundation for the public district formed in 1894. Over the decades rural schools consolidated in, a separate school served African-American children until integration in 1965, and long-serving superintendents gave the district lasting stability.
Why it matters
Crawford's schools show how a railroad relocation and steady community support could carry frontier one-room learning into a modern consolidated district across a single Texas county.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John H. Gouldy
- · J.B. Cranfill
- · Mona Boyd
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
African American Education in Belton
Belton, TX
Public education for Black students in Belton dates to 1882, when Mrs. Aleck McGee was hired "to teach the colored school." In 1890 Fisk University graduate Thomas Breckenridge Harris became the first instructor of the African American high school, and in 1936 a new building rose on this site for students of all grades, named T. W. Harris in his honor. The last class graduated in 1966, and Belton's schools integrated the following year.
Peabody School
Hillsboro, TX
In 1885 Hillsboro issued a bond to build a school for African American children in the Black neighborhood known as Freetown, naming it for George Peabody, whose fund famously aided Southern education after the Civil War. A brick building replaced the original frame structure in 1919, and the school moved to this site in 1950. Its last class graduated in 1966 as full integration approached; though the building burned in 2005, Peabody School remains a point of community pride.
First Baptist Church of Crawford
Crawford, TX
Organized in 1878 with about a dozen members meeting in the Crawford schoolhouse, this Baptist congregation weathered lean early years until an 1884 revival swelled its ranks to eighty. It built its first meetinghouse in the 1890s and drew strength from nearby Baylor University — the young George W. Truett led a revival here as a student before becoming one of the era's most famous preachers. For well over a century the church has been a spiritual and community anchor in Crawford.
First United Methodist Church of Crawford
Crawford, TX
Along the Central Texas prairie of McLennan County, faith took root the way it often did on the frontier: with families gathering in their homes for prayer and hymns as early as the 1840s. A congregation coalesced around Crawford's one-room schoolhouse in the late 1870s and was formally organized under the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. When the railroad reached the area in 1881, the whole town—church included—picked up and moved southwest to meet the tracks.