Simonton School
Simonton, Fort Bend County, Texas
Marker Inscription
IN 1893, SIMONTON COMMON SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 10 FORMED. J. B. JAMISON AND J. W. MULLINS DEEDED LAND AT THIS SITE FOR A NEW FRAME SCHOOL IN 1911. IN 1925, NOTED HOUSTON ARCHITECT LOUIS GLOVER DESIGNED THIS TWO-STORY SCHOOL FOR NINE GRADES. THE ART DECO-STYLE BUILDING HAS A STUCCOED BRICK SYMMETRICAL FAÇADE WITH PORTICOES, GROUPED WINDOWS AND ORNAMENTATION TILES. CLASSROOMS WERE ON THE FIRST FLOOR, WITH AN AUDITORIUM, STAGE, DRESSING ROOMS AND KITCHEN ABOVE. THE FACILITY ALSO HOSTED COMMUNITY DANCES, SUPPERS, ELECTIONS, CHURCH SERVICES, AND HOME CANNING DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION. LAMAR CONSOLIDATED ISD ANNEXED SIMONTON IN 1950.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Simonton Common School District formed in 1893, and by 1911 local landowners had deeded ground for a frame schoolhouse. In 1925 the noted Houston architect Louis Glover designed the two-story Art Deco building that stands here, its stuccoed brick façade dressed with porticoes, grouped windows, and ornamental tiles. Classrooms filled the ground floor while an auditorium and stage sat above—a space that doubled as the community's hall for dances, elections, church services, and Depression-era home canning until Lamar Consolidated ISD absorbed the district in 1950.
Why it matters
Rural schools like this one were the civic heart of their communities, and its architect-designed building shows the ambition small Texas towns invested in educating their children.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Louis Glover
- · J. B. Jamison
- · J. W. Mullins
Related events
- · Great Depression
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John Foster
Richmond, TX
Born in South Carolina in 1757, John Foster pushed west across the Appalachians around 1781 to the Spanish-held Natchez District, where he became a landowner, founded the town of Washington, and helped establish Jefferson College. In 1822 he joined the Texas frontier as one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," receiving an 11,600-acre grant in what is now Fort Bend County. On Christmas Day 1835 he signed the Columbia Resolutions urging Texas independence, then retired to Mississippi, where he died in 1837.
Prairie Grove Cemetery
Houston, TX
Prairie Grove recalls an African American church, school, and cemetery in Alief, where a handful of Black farm laborers and tenant farmers lived in the 1800s before more families — the Outleys, Burlesons, and Garmonds among them — arrived in the early 1900s. Prairie Grove Missionary Baptist Church, said to have first met in the Burleson home, bought this land in 1910 and raised a frame sanctuary that doubled as a schoolhouse from 1927 to 1937. The adjoining burial ground holds roughly fifty known graves, plus unmarked ones, and includes pioneer families, Freemasons, and veterans of World War II and Vietnam.
Methodism in Eagle Lake
Eagle Lake, TX
In a small Colorado County town, Methodism took root through a schoolhouse: by 1864 Emma Tracy Rhine had opened the community's first private school, and in 1872 the circuit rider Orceneth Fisher organized a Methodist congregation there. For decades the faithful shared a union church with Baptists, Episcopalians and others until each could build its own sanctuary, and in 1939 a grieving family gave land for the Colly Memorial church in memory of a daughter lost too young.
E. H. Henry Rosenwald School
Eagle Lake, TX
Before Eagle Lake had a school for Black children, they were taught at home, in churches, and even a blacksmith shop. In the late 1920s professor Eugene H. Henry—a Prairie View and Howard graduate and World War I veteran—rallied the community to seek a Rosenwald grant, the matching-fund program launched by Sears president Julius Rosenwald to build African-American schools across the segregated South. Parents, churches, and businesses raised money, and the school opened in 1930 as Colorado County's only Rosenwald school, becoming a hub of Black community life until integration in the 1960s.