Education in Livingston
Livingston, Polk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Education has been integral to life in Livingston since the town's inception in the 1840s. Moses Choate's 100-acre donation for the townsite included land for a school. Trinity Masonic Lodge No. 14, A.F. & A.M. financed a free academy that began in 1849 and operated for 31 years. Classes were held on the first floor of the Masonic lodge, located on the southwest corner of what is now Old City Cemetery. In 1888, the Livingston Free School Corporation built a frame schoolhouse on Jackson Avenue, dedicated as Livingston Graded School. Trustees added ninth and tenth grades in 1906 under principal J.F. Stevens, creating Livingston High School. Classes were on the second floor, and the first graduating class in 1908 had three students. That summer, the schools offered an institute for African American teachers; the first African American school was on West Street. A 1910 bond issue paid for a two-story brick building on Jackson Avenue designed by the noted architectural firm of C.H. Page & Son of Austin. The district divided the previous schoolhouse into a new African American school and a residence. Trustees added an eleventh grade to Livingston High School in 1913, allowing graduates to meet college entrance requirements. In the 1930s, the district built Dunbar High School for African Americans and a new Livingston High School for Anglo students. This campus later expanded with a football field, auditorium and an additional classroom building. Trustees added a twelfth grade in 1941. A Freedom of Choice program began the integration process in 1965, and three years later all students attended classes together. The high school moved to new facilities in 1977. In 2006, the centennial year for Livingston High, the graduating class had nearly 300 students. (2007)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Education took root in Livingston from the town's 1840s founding, when Moses Choate's land donation included a site for a school and the Masonic lodge financed a free academy in 1849. A graded school followed in 1888, growing into Livingston High School, whose first class graduated in 1908. The story also traces the town's separate Black schools—including Dunbar High—through the Freedom of Choice program that began integration in 1965 and full unification by 1968.
Why it matters
Livingston's schools chart the long American passage from frontier academy through racial segregation to integration in a single East Texas community.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Livingston's story of schooling begins almost at the moment the town itself began, in the 1840s, when Texas was passing from an independent republic into a young American state. On the East Texas frontier, a town was not considered complete without a place to educate its children, and the earliest settlers here treated learning as a founding institution rather than an afterthought.
The decades that followed carried Livingston through enormous change — the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive era's push to formalize public education with graded classes, dedicated buildings, and standardized diplomas. The town's schools grew right alongside those national currents, adding grades and campuses as expectations rose.
But this is also an East Texas story, which means it is a story shaped by segregation. For most of its length, the community maintained separate schools for Anglo and African American students — a divide that ran through the town's educational life until the second half of the twentieth century.
People & events
The foundation was literally a gift: Moses Choate's donation of 100 acres for the townsite set aside land for a school. Then, in 1849, Trinity Masonic Lodge No. 14 financed a free academy that met on the first floor of the lodge and operated for 31 years — an early, remarkable commitment to open education.
The modern system took shape in 1888, when the Livingston Free School Corporation built a frame schoolhouse on Jackson Avenue and dedicated it as the Livingston Graded School. In 1906, under principal J. F. Stevens, trustees added ninth and tenth grades to create Livingston High School; its very first graduating class, in 1908, numbered just three students. That same summer, the schools hosted a teaching institute for African American teachers, and the community's first African American school stood on West Street.
From there the institution kept expanding: a 1910 bond paid for a handsome two-story brick building designed by the noted Austin firm of C. H. Page & Son, and an eleventh grade was added in 1913 so graduates could meet college entrance requirements. In the 1930s the district built Dunbar High School for African American students and a separate new Livingston High School for Anglo students. A twelfth grade came in 1941. Integration arrived in stages — a Freedom of Choice program began in 1965, and within three years all students shared the same classrooms. The high school moved to new facilities in 1977, and by its 2006 centennial the graduating class had swelled to nearly 300.
Its place in the American story
Few local histories trace the whole arc of American public education as clearly as Livingston's does. It runs from the frontier academy — privately financed, held in a Masonic lodge — through the Progressive-era invention of the graded public school with its principals, bond issues, and grade-by-grade expansion, all the way to the mid-century diploma we would recognize today.
Woven through that progress is the nation's central struggle over race. The separate schools for Black and Anglo students, and the eventual move toward integration, mirror the larger American passage from segregation to civil rights. The Freedom of Choice approach that began the process in 1965, followed by full unification, played out in countless communities across the South in exactly these years.
That this entire journey unfolded in one East Texas town — from a three-student graduating class to hundreds — makes Livingston a kind of living textbook. Its schools remind us that the grand movements of national history were ultimately lived out on local streets, in buildings named after neighbors, by children walking to class.
If you visit
Livingston is a working county seat, so the best way to experience this history is to move through the town with its layers in mind. The area around the Old City Cemetery marks where the earliest academy once stood in the Masonic lodge, and Jackson Avenue carries the memory of the graded school and the brick building that followed it.
As you go, picture the changes stacked on this ground: a one-room start, then a frame schoolhouse, then that two-story brick building by a celebrated Austin architectural firm, and the separate campuses — Dunbar High among them — that a segregated era required. Reading the dates in sequence turns an ordinary town tour into a walk through more than a century and a half of learning.
For a road trip through the Piney Woods, Livingston makes a rewarding stop, and this marker gives your visit a throughline. You won't find a single grand monument so much as a town-sized story — one worth slowing down for, especially if you care about how America came to educate all of its children together.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Moses Choate
- · J.F. Stevens
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dunbar High School
Livingston, TX
Formal education for Livingston's African American children began in a West Street building in the late 1800s, in a segregated system so under-resourced that a former white schoolhouse was once rolled across town on logs by mule teams to serve Black students. In 1936 the community opened Dunbar High School—named for poet Paul Laurence Dunbar—the largest African American school in Polk County, with twelve grades and vocational training. Its Leopards won state football titles in 1953, 1954, and 1958, until the Freedom of Choice integration program led to Dunbar's closing in 1968; residents later saved the campus for continued public use.
George Washington Carver School
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As Groveton grew around the railroad and its timber industry in the 1880s, its African American families built their own schools despite chronic underfunding. In 1900 the Trinity County Lumber Company sold land for a wood-frame school in the Black neighborhood, which served until 1955; by 1956 the growing school was named for botanist and inventor George Washington Carver. Principal T. L. Mathis led the school from 1956 to 1965, tirelessly advocating for its students, while the community itself funded sports, a marching band, and other activities. After integration in 1965, the building became Groveton Junior High.
Site of Henry T. Scott School
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