Monaville Independent School District
Monaville, Waller County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Monaville, Aurora, and Bracy Island schools opened in this area during the last quarter of the 19th century when many rural schools were established throughout Waller County. Bracy Island School, established nearby sometime prior to 1890, and Monaville School, located at this site, constituted School District No. 13 in 1893-94. Aurora School, located about 5 miles south of here, opened in 1898. In 1903-1904 the three schools had a combined enrollment of 146 students. In 1904 William and Ella M. Wright deeded one acre of land here to the Monaville Community School District. Monaville, Aurora and Bracy Island schools continued to serve the Monaville rural community until about the mid-1920s when both Aurora and Bracy Island schools were closed. In 1930 efforts by the state to create geographic high school units resulted in the consolidation of a number of districts in the area, including the Sunnyside School (about 5 miles SW), into the Monaville Independent School District. Monaville High School became a 3-year institution in 1931. The area's rural population began to decline after the 1930s Depression. By 1953 Monaville's rural schools had closed and area students were enrolled in the Pattison and Hempstead Independent School Districts. (1994)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Monaville's rise and fall traces the whole arc of rural American education—from scattered one-room schoolhouses through Depression-era consolidation to closure as farm communities emptied out.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · William Wright
- · Ella M. Wright
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Highland Home School
Brookshire vicinity, TX
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.
Hempstead High School
Hempstead, TX
Hempstead platted a school site when the town was founded in 1856, but war and hard times delayed a real building for years, and classes met in rented rooms — even the old county jail, leased at $250 a year. A bond issue finally funded this $10,000 schoolhouse, and in 1887 the principal, faculty, and students paraded from the jail to their new home as townspeople cheered. Renamed Hempstead High School that year, it graduated its first class of six in 1888 and grew steadily alongside the town.
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.
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.