Rock Springs Schoolhouse
Gladewater, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1849, with donated labor and lumber. One-teacher school was taught here until 1930's. First teacher was J. C. Vernon. First trustees: Thomas G. Chisum, James "Squire" Dillingham, Joel Smith. (Smith donated the site.) Building was also used for church, Grange, socials, fraternal meetings, and political rallies. Community named for nearby springs. Settled by pioneers from Tennessee. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1966
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Raised in 1849 with donated lumber and neighborly labor, the Rock Springs Schoolhouse served East Texas pioneers — many of them Tennessee transplants — for the better part of a century. A single teacher held class here into the 1930s, but the building was really the community's beating heart, doubling as church, Grange hall, lodge, and stage for socials and political rallies. It stands as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Why it matters
One-room schoolhouses like this were the civic anchor of frontier settlement, where a scattered rural community became a community at all.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · J. C. Vernon
- · Joel Smith
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Starrville Community
Winona, TX
In 1852 the Rev. Joshua Starr, a Methodist minister from Alabama, bought a square mile of land on the Dallas-Shreveport Road and laid out Starrville, selling lots with covenants forbidding gambling and liquor. It grew into one of Smith County's earliest and liveliest towns, with mills, foundries, a wagon factory, and a remarkable cluster of schools — a female high school, a Baptist female academy, and a male college — all before the Civil War. Then the Tyler Tap Railroad bypassed it in the 1870s, and the town slowly emptied as post office, lodge, and schools moved away to Winona.
Elmira Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Longview, TX
This East Texas congregation grew out of Sunday School classes that Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church began holding in the Spring Hill Schoolhouse in the late 1880s. Organized in the 1890s under its first resident pastor, the church took its name from Elmira Castleberry, matriarch of a prominent pioneer family whose sons served as founding elders and donated land and materials for a combined school and church building in 1897-98. The congregation remained active in community and missionary work for generations.
Shady Grove Cemetery
Gilmer, TX
In 1852 land promoter Frost Thorn gave four acres to the Shady Grove Missionary Baptist congregation for a church and school, and the churchyard became a cemetery when two young children were buried a day apart in November 1855. The growing community gained businesses, a high school, and a post office before the Church of Christ built a new sanctuary here in 1889. Local women's clubs and, later, a cemetery association took up the long work of tending the grounds that record the once-thriving village of Shady Grove.
Kelsey School
Enon, TX
In the late 1890s the Edgar brothers and other Latter-day Saint families from Alabama settled along Kelsey Creek, and by 1901 church officials had founded the area's first branch and school. Upshur County created Kelsey School District No. 45 in 1907, and a two-story brick schoolhouse rose in 1911, drawing students as smaller nearby schools closed. Failed crops and the Great Depression thinned the population, and the school closed in 1943.