Site of Chapel Hill College
Daingerfield, Morris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Chartered 1850. Opened 1852 in brick building on land donated by Allen Urquhart, Republic of Texas surveyor. Founded by Marshall Presbytery of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, to educate ministers. Also offered courses in medicine, law and liberal arts. Closed in 1869 for lack of students and funds.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Chapel Hill College was chartered in 1850 and opened in 1852 in a brick building on land donated by Republic of Texas surveyor Allen Urquhart. Founded by the Marshall Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church to train ministers, it also taught medicine, law, and the liberal arts. A shortage of students and funds forced it to close in 1869.
Why it matters
Short-lived frontier colleges like Chapel Hill reflect the early Texas drive to plant higher learning and train clergy even before towns were fully established.
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Related people
- · Allen Urquhart
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Daingerfield, TX
This congregation reaches back to 1849, when Presbyterian settlers in the young state of Texas first gathered for worship in one another's parlors. For decades beginning in 1852 they met in the Chapel Hill College building on this spot, and for a time the sanctuary was shared with Baptists and known as the "Union Church." A shrinking population forced the church to close its doors in 1925, but the faithful reorganized in 1950 and returned to their historic ground.
County Line Baptist Church and Cemetery
Daingerfield, TX
County Line Baptist Church traces its records to 1859 and likely stood even earlier, its cemetery already in use by 1863 when three-year-old John C. Leftwich became the first marked burial. For a decade around the turn of the century the log church doubled as the County Line Community School before a new building rose in 1901. When age and storm damage forced the congregation to relocate in 1943, the once scraped-earth cemetery was left to grow over in grass, and a cemetery association formed to tend it in 1976.
Site of Valley View School, Site of
Daingerfield vicinity, TX
When Morris County drew up its school districts in 1893, this corner fell within the Valley View District, and the Fomby family donated 3.5 acres for a schoolhouse moved here from nearby Snow Hill. It grew from one room to two as enrollment rose, teaching local children through the eighth grade before they went on to Daingerfield High School. The school closed in 1935 and its district was folded into Daingerfield in 1952.
Center Point School
Pittsburg, TX
Center Point grew up as a Freedmen's community in the years just after emancipation, settled by the Willie Johnson family and other formerly enslaved people around 1865–70. In 1899 G. W. Goulsby opened its first school in a single room, and over the following decades it expanded—aided by the Julius Rosenwald Fund—into a full campus with a library, dormitories, cafeteria, and gymnasium, where students ran a working farm and cannery. The school served the community until it closed in 1952.