Highland Home School
Brookshire vicinity, Waller County, Texas
Marker Inscription
A small white frame schoolhouse, erected here in the 1890s, served families in this rural area until 1929. Initially called Boyd School for D. R. Boyd, on whose land it was built, it later became known as Highland Home School. Children in grades one through seven were taught by one teacher, and the schoolhouse also served as a community gathering place. As was the case with many early rural Texas schools, Highland Home School closed in 1929 after it was consolidated with the Waller Independent School District.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Erected in the 1890s on land owned by D.R. Boyd, this small white frame schoolhouse first bore his name before becoming known as Highland Home School. A single teacher taught grades one through seven, and the building doubled as a gathering place for the surrounding rural community. Like countless one-room Texas schools, it closed in 1929 when it was consolidated into the Waller Independent School District.
Why it matters
The one-room schoolhouse was the civic heart of rural America, and Highland Home's rise and consolidation mirror the nationwide shift from scattered country schools to larger districts.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · D.R. Boyd
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Monaville Independent School District
Monaville, TX
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, one-room schools like Monaville, Aurora, and Bracy Island sprang up across rural Waller County to serve scattered farm families. The schools organized into districts in the 1890s, and in 1904 local landowners deeded an acre here to the Monaville school. State efforts to build larger high school units led to a 1930 consolidation into the Monaville Independent School District, but as the rural population thinned after the Depression the district's schools closed by 1953, with students absorbed into neighboring towns.
South Texas Baptist College
Waller, TX
Founded by an ambitious circle of Texas Baptists in 1898, this college opened with just three students in the town of Waller and grew quickly, drawing more than a hundred by its second session. Its curriculum ran from primary grades through college subjects, with tuition of just ten to twenty dollars a term. Then, on the night of September 8-9, 1900, the great Galveston hurricane roared inland and wrecked the college building along with churches and the public school; the damage was so severe that the college never reopened.
Prairie View A&M University
Prairie View, TX
Authorized by the Texas legislature in 1876 as the "Agricultural and Mechanical College for Colored Youth," this land-grant school opened in 1878 on a 1,434-acre former slave plantation, making it Texas's second state college. After an early closure it reorganized as a normal institute to train Black teachers, then grew steadily into a full college by the 1930s. Integrated in the 1960s, it took its present name, Prairie View A&M University, in 1973.
Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery
Prairie View, TX
This burial ground began on Jared E. Kirby's Alta Vista Plantation, where, by oral tradition, the Kirby family set aside land for the graves of enslaved people from Alta Vista and from cousin Leonard Waller Croce's nearby Liendo Plantation. Its many unmarked graves are believed to date to the antebellum years, when the enslaved rarely had means for lasting headstones. After emancipation the community kept using the site — Kirby's widow deeded the plantation in 1876 for what became Prairie View A&M University — and it took the name of the nearby Wyatt Chapel, holding the graves of former slaves, their descendants, and veterans of both World Wars.