Near Sites of Kokomo School
Gorman vicinity, Eastland County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First building erected in this once-thriving community was a one-room log schoolhouse, 1886. Only furnishings were a stove and split-log benches. In 1899 better equipment was acquired and a larger (30' x 60') frame building was erected. In 1907 it was enlarged to two rooms. This school was consolidated with the Carbon School in 1949. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The first building in the little community of Kokomo was a one-room log schoolhouse raised in 1886, furnished with nothing more than a stove and split-log benches. Better equipment and a larger frame building followed in 1899, and by 1907 it had grown to two rooms. In 1949 the school was consolidated with Carbon, and the once-thriving settlement dwindled away.
Why it matters
The Kokomo school marks how frontier Texans built learning into their communities from the very first log, and how rural school consolidation later hollowed out hundreds of such towns.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Burkett House
Eastland, TX
Joe Burkett — who with his father and brother discovered and propagated the original Burkett pecan tree in 1900 — was also a schoolteacher, county official, and state legislator. He and his wife Fannye built this home in 1919–1920 on a working farm lot with outbuildings. New owners reworked it in the 1930s in the popular period-revival taste, and its stucco walls, low hipped tile roof, and porte cochere give it a Spanish Colonial Revival look.
First Christian Church
Eastland, TX
First Christian Church organized in Eastland in 1878 under the Rev. Cyrus Scarborough, counting several town founders among its early members. It moved from the county courthouse to its own facilities in 1886 and built on this site in 1907. Over more than a century it built a reputation for ecumenical cooperation and community service, from a park constructed in an African American neighborhood during segregation to food pantries, a jail ministry, and holiday drives.
Nineveh Cemetery
Sipe Springs, TX
The community of Nineveh grew as Southerners moved west after the Civil War, and in 1886 Hezekiah Bellamy gave two acres here for a school and cemetery. A Harvard-educated young schoolmaster named both for ancient Assyria's Nineveh. Elizabeth McNeely (1804–1890) was the first person interred, and her descendants, the Dukes family, have long tended the roughly two dozen graves that hold members of several pioneer Comanche County families.
Pleasant Hill Baptist Church
Carbon vicinity, TX
Eight charter members organized the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in the old Pleasant Hill Schoolhouse in 1892, joining the regional Cisco Baptist Association the next year and starting a Sunday school in 1894. Fire destroyed the first sanctuary in 1905, but the congregation rebuilt in 1906 and again in 1945, and several of its pastors went on to hold prominent posts at area colleges. The church has stayed active in community and missionary work.