Site of Hilliard High School

🏛️The era

In the 1890s, Bay City was still a young town. It had recently become the seat of Matagorda County, set in flat coastal prairie and farmland near the Colorado River, a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Like the rest of Texas, it was hardening into the Jim Crow order. Laws and customs were pushing Black and white Texans into separate schools, churches and public spaces.

For African American families, many of them only a generation out of slavery, schooling was one of the most valued things freedom had brought. The state gave segregated Black schools far less than it gave white ones: less money, fewer teachers and poorer buildings. So Black communities across the South often raised schools largely through their own effort, then pressed local districts to take them on and fund them.

Around the turn of the century, the name Booker T. Washington carried enormous weight in Black education. The Tuskegee educator was probably the best-known African American in the country, and naming a school after him was a statement of ambition and self-reliance. That is what Bay City's Black community chose when it built a bigger schoolhouse in the early 1900s.

The school's later history follows the larger arc of the 20th century. It kept growing through the 1920s and 1940s, a new building went up after World War II, and the old system of segregated schools slowly came apart in the years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

👥People & events

The school began small, with a community determined to teach its children and A. A. Deleon as its first teacher. More teachers followed soon after, including a young man named A. G. Hilliard, whose name would eventually go on the school itself. By 1904 the first building was too small, and the community got a larger one: a two-story frame schoolhouse named for Booker T. Washington, which the Bay City School District took over in 1905.

Hilliard's own story is the heart of this place. He was born in Georgia in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, and came to Texas as a boy with his parents, Bunk and Mary. They had been enslaved, and they had been denied learning, so they treasured it. He trained at the Oakland Normal School in Gonzales, which had been founded to prepare African American teachers. His mother then urged him to keep going, and he went on to Prairie View, the state's normal college for Black Texans.

He gave 28 years of a 48-year career to Bay City, first as a teacher and later as principal. The workload was heavy. By 1926 the school had 225 students and only four teachers. When Hilliard died in 1936, the trustees renamed the school Hilliard High School in his honor, and his son, A. G. Hilliard II, became principal after him. Hilliard is buried in Bay City's Eastview Cemetery beside his wife, Pearl.

By the 1940s the school needed a new home again. The district hired Wyatt C. Hedrick, one of the best-known architects in Texas at the time, and his building opened on this site in 1948. It served as Hilliard High until 1967 and then as a junior high for two more years. Over those decades its students won two state football championships and many other honors, a record of achievement the community never stopped taking pride in.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Hilliard High tells a story repeated in thousands of towns across the segregated South. Black communities built schools with their own hands and money, kept them going through decades of unequal funding, and turned them into anchors of community life. The teachers and principals in these schools were often among the most respected figures in town.

The Hilliard family story also traces the path of education after emancipation. Within a single lifetime, the son of formerly enslaved parents trained at institutions created to produce Black teachers, then spent his career training the next generation. Normal schools like Oakland and Prairie View multiplied that effect, sending teachers out to small towns all over Texas.

The school's closing in 1967 fits the long, uneven end of legal segregation in American schools. Integration brought hard-won rights, but it also often meant losing Black-led schools that communities had built and loved. Former students of schools like Hilliard frequently remember them as places of high expectations and fierce loyalty, and this marker preserves that memory.

🧭If you visit

The marker stands at the site of the 1948 school building designed by Wyatt C. Hedrick, which housed Hilliard High from 1948 to 1967. As you stand here, picture the decades of students, teachers and families who made this ground the center of Black education in Bay City. The marker itself is the community's lasting tribute.

If you'd like to go further, Eastview Cemetery in Bay City is where A. G. Hilliard and his wife Pearl are buried. It is a quiet place to reflect on a teacher whose career spanned nearly half a century. Please be respectful in a cemetery that is still in use.

Bay City is a good stop on a road trip along the Texas coast. It sits in the coastal plain southwest of Houston, near the Colorado River and the Gulf. Combine the visit with time in the county seat's historic downtown, and look for other markers nearby that tell more of Matagorda County's story.