Goodrich School
Goodrich, Polk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
GOODRICH IS ONE OF THE FEW EXISTING AREA SCHOOLS KNOWN TO BE CREATED THROUGH THE FEDERAL WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA). CONSTRUCTION OF THE JEFFERSONIAN STYLE BUILDING BEGAN MAY 2, 1934 UNDER ARCHITECT EMORY S. WHITE WHEN COUNTY COMMISSIONER AND SCHOOL TRUSTEE W. R. ARMITAGE SOLD THE PROPERTY TO THE SCHOOL DISTRICT. SINCE ITS COMPLETION, THE AUDITORIUM IN PARTICULAR HAS BEEN A SOURCE OF PRIDE, HOUSING VARIOUS PUBLIC EVENTS. CREATED DURING A TIME WHICH FOCUSED ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL SCHOOLS, GOODRICH CONTINUES TO SERVE AS A CENTER AND GATHERING PLACE FOR THE COMMUNITY.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Goodrich School is one of the few area schoolhouses known to have been built through the federal Works Progress Administration, with construction beginning in May 1934 under architect Emory S. White. Its Jeffersonian-style design and prized auditorium made it a source of community pride during a national push to strengthen rural schools. Long after classes, it has continued to serve as a gathering place for the town.
Why it matters
The building is a tangible legacy of the New Deal's investment in rural education and public architecture during the Great Depression.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Emory S. White
- · W. R. Armitage
Related events
- · Works Progress Administration
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Trinity Lodge No. 14, A.F. & A.M.
Livingston, TX
Organized in 1840 in the vanished river town of Swartwout when this was still Liberty County, Trinity Lodge did far more than hold Masonic rites—its members founded and bankrolled the area's first schools, furnishing the lower floor of the lodge for classes and paying teachers' salaries and tuition. When the lodge moved to Livingston in 1846, it again housed the town's first school, a role it filled until 1908.
Education in Livingston
Livingston, TX
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.
Central Baptist Church
Livingston, TX
The Baptists of Livingston founded Ariel Baptist Church around 1852, and the congregation has carried several names since — Livingston Baptist after the Civil War, and Central Baptist from 1917. In 1887 two women, Susan Hunt and Patience Watts, helped buy the church its first lot, and its first permanent building rose the next year. Across the decades the church built ministries in missions, education, publishing, and eventually radio and television.
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.