Duffau School
Stephenville, Erath County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This schoolhouse was built by architect-contractor George Coleman of Stephenville in 1936 with the $4,700 insurance settlement received after an earlier school building burned. The simple one-story structure, built of brick veneer over frame construction, is topped by a hipped metal roof and features a shed-roof front porch entry. Heated with wood stoves and lighted with oil lamps, it served the community as a school until 1958, when the Duffau School was consolidated with schools in nearby Hico. The building was converted to a community center maintained by local citizens. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1998
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the Duffau community's school burned, residents rebuilt in 1936 with a $4,700 insurance settlement, hiring Stephenville architect-contractor George Coleman to raise a modest brick-veneered schoolhouse with a hipped metal roof. Heated by wood stoves and lit by oil lamps, it taught local children until 1958, when Duffau consolidated with the schools in nearby Hico. Rather than let it stand empty, neighbors converted the building into a community center they have maintained ever since.
Why it matters
It captures the arc of the rural one-room school — built by a community, closed by mid-century consolidation, and kept alive as a gathering place for the countryside that raised it.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · George Coleman
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cornelia Graves
Stephenville, TX
Born in Dallas in 1875, Cornelia Tyler trained at Prairie View Normal School and Hearne Academy before becoming the principal and sole teacher of Stephenville's school for African American children, where she taught for nearly twenty years. She married Civil War veteran John Graves and continued teaching in Amarillo after the couple moved for his health. In 1951 a Stephenville elementary school was named Cornelia Graves in her honor.
Mineral Springs Primitive Baptist Church
Glen Rose, TX
Founded in 1886 by Elder Wilson Hufner and W. L. Rogers in the community of Post Oak, this Primitive Baptist congregation joined with fifteen neighboring churches in 1899 to form the Duffau Association, the largest of its kind in Texas. Its meeting house was relocated to this site around 1920, and in the mid-1950s the grounds became home to a summer youth camp. The present sanctuary was moved here in 1960.
Post Oak Community
Glen Rose, TX
Settled in the years after the Civil War, Post Oak took its name from the trees common to Somervell County and grew up around its churches, school, and cemetery. The Rev. Seaborn Foust donated the adjoining parcels that formed the community's core, and the Missionary Baptist church loomed largest in its life. Cotton and fruit gave way to peanuts and cattle, and though many residents left for the cities by the 1940s, construction of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant beginning in 1972 revived the settlement on its eastern edge.
Panter Branch School
Tolar, TX
In operation by 1898, the two-room Panter Branch School served rural Hood County children with up to 42 pupils spread across the first eight grades. For several years a husband-and-wife pair, Tony and Grace Morrison, taught side by side. Like other country schools, it closed for weeks each fall so children could help pick cotton and bring in the harvest before finally consolidating with Tolar in 1949.