Site of Captain LeTellier's School

🏛️The era

In 1871 Texas was still finding its footing after the Civil War. Reconstruction was underway, and North Texas towns like Sherman were growing fast as new settlers, new businesses and, before long, new railroads arrived. Families who wanted their children ready for that changing world had few good options.

Public schooling in Texas was weak and unsettled in those years. In most towns, education came from private and subscription schools: small operations run by one teacher and paid for by parents' monthly tuition. How good a child's education was often came down to how good that one teacher was.

That is the setting for Captain LeTellier's school. It began in a large frame building, cost $3 a month, and was run by a man who had studied in Virginia and served in the Confederate army. It was typical of how a frontier-era Texas town educated its young people, and unusually good at it.

👥People & events

John H. LeTellier was born in Virginia in 1842 and studied at Bethany College there before the war. He served as a Confederate captain, and the rank stayed with him for life. In Sherman his school's official name was the Sherman Private School, but everyone called it "The Cap'n's."

The Captain was strict about the basics. His pupils drilled English, spelling and math over and over, and he put special weight on oral arithmetic, solving problems aloud and in your head. Students earned a certificate for each subject they finished. It was a demanding system, and the marker says the school's standards were high.

Outside class he was a different person. At recess he joined the boys' games. He told stories about his war years, sang, and played the guitar. Sometimes he held dances upstairs, with the handyman, "Old Jim," playing the fiddle. Every fall the students' fathers brought wagons, and the whole school rode out to the Choctaw Bottoms for a pecan hunt the children loved most of all.

The school was mostly for boys, but a few younger girls were admitted, and in later years LeTellier's daughter Clifford taught there too. It lasted as long as its founder did. When he died in 1913 the school closed. He and his family are buried in Sherman's West Hill Cemetery.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Before large public school systems existed, much of American education depended on schools like this one, built around a single teacher's personality. A teacher like LeTellier was the whole institution: curriculum, discipline, coach and entertainer in one person. When he died, the school died with him.

The school also shows how the Civil War generation shaped the South afterward. Many former officers became teachers, lawyers and civic leaders, and they carried their experiences and loyalties into classrooms where the next generation grew up. LeTellier's war stories at recess were part of how that memory was passed along.

The marker notes that many of his pupils became leading citizens of the area. It was also paid for by a former student, Harry (Pete) Hudgins. A teacher remembered warmly enough that a former pupil paid for his marker is a good measure of what these small schools meant.

🧭If you visit

The marker is in Sherman, the Grayson County seat, and it marks the site of the school rather than a surviving building. Stand there and try to picture a large frame schoolhouse full of children reciting sums aloud, and an upstairs room cleared for a fiddle-and-guitar dance.

To see the rest of the story, visit West Hill Cemetery, where the marker says the Captain and his family are buried. Seeing both the school site and the grave gives you the full sweep of one teacher's forty-plus years in town.

If you come in autumn, remember the pecan hunts. North Texas river bottoms are still pecan country, and it is easy to imagine a line of farm wagons full of excited children heading out for the Captain's favorite outing of the year. Families traveling with kids might ask them which part of "The Cap'n's" they would have liked best: the oral arithmetic drills, or the recess games with the teacher.