Martindale School and Gymnasium
Martindale, Caldwell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Martindale’s School and Gymnasium operated from 1921-1968 and served as a gathering spot for the entire community. Many recall fond and formative memories of “Old Martindale School,” whose large size brought the town together in sharing culture through education and entertainment. Residents looked forward to events like carnivals, Miss Louise Lawson’s music classes and fundraising events like faculty members playing basketball while riding donkeys. The growing population of students in the farming town required a suitable site for classrooms and school functions. The new building was designed by Austin architects C.H. Page & Bro. in mission revival style. Built in 1921, concrete was transported by horse and carriage from San Antonio to be mixed on site and finished with stucco. In 1939, during the Great Depression, the Wildcats gladly welcomed the construction of a gymnasium. Austin architects Driscoll and Gross (also known for Barton Springs Bathhouse and Deep Eddy Bathhouse in Austin) designed the building with hollow tile and roof trusses by Carnegie Steel. Construction was partially funded by the Federal New Deal agencies. The desegregation of 140 Hispanic students from a separate schoolhouse to join the main Martindale School occurred in 1948. There is no evidence or recollection of African American students attending Martindale School. Overall attendance declined as many residents flocked to urban areas in the 1960s. This caused depopulation and a contentious vote for the school to be merged with the San Marcos district in 1965. In the years after the school closed, the property served in various commercial and residential capacities. The site remains significant in the educational and cultural history of the community. (2019)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
For nearly fifty years the Martindale School was the beating heart of this small Caldwell County farming town, a place remembered for carnivals, music classes, and faculty playing basketball while riding donkeys. Austin architects designed the 1921 mission-revival building — its concrete hauled by horse and carriage from San Antonio — and a New Deal–funded gymnasium followed in 1939. In 1948 the school desegregated its Hispanic students from a separate schoolhouse, and declining rural population led to its 1965 merger with San Marcos.
Why it matters
The school's arc, from a Depression-era WPA gym to a 1948 desegregation of Mexican American children, captures how education, federal relief, and civil rights all played out in one small Texas community.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Southside School
San Marcos, TX
For the first half of the twentieth century San Marcos, like most American towns, segregated its schools, teaching Mexican American children in a succession of separate buildings. When the city funded a new segregated school in 1948, members of the Mexican American community petitioned to integrate instead, arguing the building would only entrench division; Southside School opened anyway in 1949. In time it became one of the first Texas schools to offer bilingual education, and today houses a Hispanic cultural center.
Lockhart Vocational High School (Carver HS)
Lockhart, TX
Built in 1923 for Lockhart's African American students—reportedly with materials salvaged from a former white school—this two-story brick and stucco schoolhouse was designed and partly funded through the Rosenwald Foundation, with the district and Black citizens raising the rest. Before it opened, Black children had studied in scattered churches, lodges, and even a funeral parlor. Accredited in 1926 and renamed G.W. Carver High School in 1946, it closed with integration in 1964 and later housed a Head Start program.
Buda School
Buda, TX
The Buda school system grew from the consolidation of several nineteenth-century country schools, beginning with Mary Adams's 1881 classroom beside the railroad tracks. Successive buildings rose and burned, and the present Mission-style schoolhouse of 1928 was built around the surviving walls of its predecessor, still visible in the auditorium. Over the twentieth century the school integrated its Mexican American and African American students and eventually merged into the Hays Consolidated district.
Antioch Colony
Buda, TX
Antioch Colony was a farming community formed after the Civil War by formerly enslaved African Americans who found it hard to buy land in freedom. Beginning in 1870, Anglo businessman Joseph Rowley sold parcels along Onion Creek to former slaves, sometimes writing restrictions into the deeds that may have been meant to protect the new owners from losing their property. Residents Elias and Clarisa Bunton donated land for a school and church in 1874, and the colony sustained Baptist and Methodist churches, a Masonic lodge, and an Eastern Star chapter until families drifted away by the 1950s; descendants have since returned to reclaim ancestral land.