One Half Mile North to the Site Once Occupied by Trinity University
Tehuacana, Limestone County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established by the Brazos Synod of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Opened its doors as a co-educational institution September 23, 1869. Chartered August 13, 1870. Included schools of law and theology. Removed in 1902 to Waxahachie.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the years after the Civil War, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church founded Trinity University at Tehuacana, opening its doors in 1869 to both men and women—a notably progressive choice for the era. Chartered in 1870, the school offered instruction that reached even into law and theology. In 1902 the institution relocated to Waxahachie, continuing a life that endures elsewhere today.
Why it matters
Church-founded colleges like Trinity carried higher education into frontier Texas, and its early coeducation reflects a widening of who was thought worthy of a college classroom.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Tehuacana
Tehuacana, TX
Perched on one of the highest points between Dallas and Houston, Tehuacana was home to the Tehuacana Indians, a Wichita people who farmed here until Cherokee raids destroyed them in the early 1830s. Settler John Boyd secured a Mexican land grant in 1835, and the town he built even vied to become the state capital in 1850. Its Presbyterian academy helped spark the founding of Trinity University in 1869, and later colleges kept the hilltop a seat of learning for generations.
William Rees
Tehuacana, TX
William Rees carried a Liverpool stonemason's training across the Atlantic in 1870, arriving in the tiny college town of Tehuacana two years later. When Presbyterian-backed Trinity University ran short of funds in 1873, the skilled Welsh-descended craftsman took the contract for the building's wings and did much of the fine stonecutting himself—labor usually left to hired hands. A devoted champion of education who served on and led the local school board, Rees embodied the immigrant artisan who helped literally build the institutions of a young Texas.
Tehuacana Cemetery
Tehuacana, TX
Tehuacana grew up around John Boyd, a Republic of Texas congressman who moved here in the 1840s and opened the town's first post office in his store in 1847. His gift of land and money brought Trinity University to the hilltop town in 1869, and the cemetery's oldest documented grave belongs to his infant granddaughter, who died in 1850. Among the many small headstones testifying to the frontier's harshness lie college founders, a state comptroller, and Boyd himself, a roll call of the town's rise as an early Texas education center.
Miss Rogers' Music Room
Mexia, TX
In the small Central Texas town of Mexia, Laura T. Rogers ran an extraordinary music school directly across from the public school for four decades beginning in 1880. From dawn to dusk, six days a week, she drilled generations of children on four pianos at once, sometimes eight students playing together, and staged recitals and dramas that spilled into the yard. As a longtime church organist and choir director, she made music a fixture of community life in an era when small towns built their culture themselves.