Site of Breslau School
Halletsville, Lavaca County, Texas
Marker Inscription
German and Czech immigrants moved to this area in the 1860s and 1870s and established small farms to grow cotton. Their community, named Breslau in honor of the Prussian city of Breslau, was located on the east side of the Lavaca River. Fritz Ladewig established a store and cotton gin in the 1870s, and in 1872 donated land for a school. In 1887, the school building was converted to a teacherage and a larger schoolhouse was erected. The community of Breslau prospered, and in 1880 a post office was established. Henry Weller donated an acre of land for a school for African American residents and a schoolhouse was built. After 1900 Breslau included stores, a blacksmith, dance hall, school and Lutheran and Catholic churches. Private donations supported the school until 1910 when a school tax of seven cents was levied and additional classrooms were constructed. A teacherage was built in 1919, and in 1922 Wessel Buss sold three acres of land on which a modern school building was built. The African American school closed in 1955. The Breslau School provided quality education for the community until June 1963 when the school was closed and consolidated with Halletsville schools. (1997)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
German and Czech immigrants settling here in the 1860s and 1870s grew cotton and named their community Breslau for the Prussian city, building a school on land Fritz Ladewig donated in 1872. Henry Weller later gave an acre for a separate school for the area's African American residents, and by 1900 Breslau boasted stores, churches, a blacksmith, and a dance hall. Both schools eventually closed with consolidation, the African American school in 1955 and the main Breslau School in 1963.
Why it matters
Breslau shows a mixed German-Czech immigrant settlement that, even in a small farming community, mirrored the segregated dual-school system of the Jim Crow South.
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Related people
- · Fritz Ladewig
- · Henry Weller
- · Wessel Buss
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Radhost School
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The farming community of Radhost was settled largely by Czech immigrants, who funded a school that opened in 1873. It began as a one-teacher school taught in the Bohemian language and grew into a two-classroom English school with a new building in 1930. Serving grades one through ten, its calendar bent to the rhythms of farm life, beginning each year only after the crops were harvested, until it was annexed by the Hallettsville district in 1955.
Stacy School
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As waves of German and Czech immigrants settled Lavaca County near the turn of the 20th century, the county carved out rural school districts to teach their children. The Stacy School — named for landowner J.B. Stacy, who set aside the original site — grew from an 1880s private school into a two-room frame schoolhouse with a stage for plays, a windmill for water, and games of marbles and "mumbly peg" at recess. For most of its 58 years a single teacher handled six grades and about forty students; enrollment peaked at 54 during World War II before rural consolidation closed it in 1954.
Witting School
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When German-speaking immigrants poured into northwestern Lavaca County in the 1870s and 1880s, wealthy commission merchant George Witting became a major landowner and, in 1880, donated an acre for a non-sectarian German-English school. A small frame building went up that year and was replaced by a larger three-room schoolhouse by 1890 as enrollment swelled. Sustained partly by tuition and used for decades as a temporary Lutheran church, the Witting School served as a community hub until it consolidated with other schools in 1969, one of the county's oldest and last to close.
Site of Moravia School
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Czech and German families settling South Texas in the 1870s built the farming community of Moravia, complete with church, businesses, and a schoolhouse. Classes were taught largely in Czech until 1895, and the two-story school raised in 1887 was rebuilt and enlarged over the decades as neighboring rural schools faded. Moravia's school outlasted many of them, finally closing in 1972 when it consolidated with Hallettsville.