Lower South Grape Creek School
Stonewall, Gillespie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Area settlers built a log schoolhouse 1.5 miles south of here in 1871 along South Grape Creek. It was part of Luckenbach School Precinct No. 3 until 1889, when it was renamed Lower South Grape Creek and began to serve as District No. 21. The log schoolhouse was replaced with this structure in 1901. It is typical of early 1900s rural school buildings found in Texas' Hill Country. The stuccoed limestone building features an open plan and bell tower with a pyramidal roof. the school closed in 1960 and merged with the fredericksburg School District. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1994
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Area settlers built a log schoolhouse along South Grape Creek in 1871, first as part of the Luckenbach precinct and, after 1889, as its own District No. 21. In 1901 the log building gave way to this stuccoed limestone structure with an open plan and a bell tower capped by a pyramidal roof—typical of early-1900s rural schools in the Texas Hill Country. The school served the community until it closed in 1960 and merged with Fredericksburg.
Why it matters
The little Hill Country schoolhouse preserves the era of the one-room rural school, the cornerstone of education for generations of frontier and farm children.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Luckenbach School
Luckenbach, TX
In 1855 pioneer settler Peter Pehl deeded two acres here for a schoolhouse to serve the Luckenbach district, and Herman Toepperwein taught the first classes in a log building. That structure served until 1905, when the present native-limestone schoolhouse was completed. The Luckenbach School kept its doors open until 1964, when it consolidated with the Fredericksburg district.
Major Israel M. Nunez
Stonewall, TX
A Civil War veteran turned stage-line operator, Israel M. Nunez founded the community of Stonewall in 1870 and named it in tribute to Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. Raising a family of nine south of town, Nunez helped anchor the settlement by donating land in 1886 for Stonewall School No. 18. His life traces the arc of a defeated Confederacy rebuilding itself in the Texas Hill Country.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Stonewall, TX
As a twelve-year-old, the future 36th President attended eighth-grade classes at the old Stonewall school from October 1920 to June 1921. The one-year stint places young Lyndon Baines Johnson in the small Hill Country schoolhouses that shaped his early years before his rise through Texas and national politics.
Jakob (Jacob) Brodbeck
Luckenbach, TX
A German-born teacher who immigrated to the Texas Hill Country in 1846, Jakob Brodbeck never let go of a dream he first had at sea: to build a flying machine. Teaching in Fredericksburg, Luckenbach, and San Antonio to fund his work, he raised money by selling shares and, shortly after the Civil War, launched a coil-spring-powered airship north of San Antonio—it lifted off before the mechanism failed. Though he never rebuilt it, in 1967 Texas Governor John Connally dubbed him "the father of U.S. Aviation."