Site of Omaha School
Omaha, Morris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Land was first purchased for a public school in Omaha in 1892 and a large wooden building near the railroad tracks soon housed three teachers and 165 students. The community formed an independent school district in 1905 and built a new two-story brick structure the following year. It was enlarged as necessary, including the addition of a rock gymnasium erected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) between 1938 and 1940. After a tornado damaged the property in 1950, the school merged with nearby Naples at the urging of a wealthy oilman and rancher who promised financial backing for the consolidated district. The WPA gym was renovated for commercial use by its new owner. (1999) Incise on back: Glenda Brown Scarborough Sandra Smith Forsyth
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Omaha bought land for a public school in 1892, and a wooden building by the railroad tracks soon held three teachers and 165 students. The community incorporated its own school district in 1905, replaced the frame building with brick, and—like countless Depression-era towns—gained a sturdy WPA rock gymnasium between 1938 and 1940. A 1950 tornado hastened consolidation with neighboring Naples, backed by a local oilman, and the old gym found new commercial life.
Why it matters
The rise, expansion, and consolidation of small rural schools like Omaha's mirror the twentieth-century transformation of American public education and the mark New Deal labor left on even the smallest towns.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Concord Meeting House
Omaha, TX
Built around 1860 to replace an earlier log church, the Concord Meeting House did the multiple duty typical of a rural East Texas building—serving at once as a place of worship, a schoolhouse, and a polling place. It carries on today as a Baptist church, a thread of continuity running from the eve of the Civil War to the present.
Naples Cemetery
Naples, TX
The earliest recorded burial here is Elizabeth A. Baker, who died in April 1883, followed by others reinterred from the local school grounds. In 1892 J. H. Mathews sold about an acre to the trustees of Belden Public School for $12.50 to use as a cemetery, and when the town of Belden was renamed Naples in 1895 the graveyard's name changed with it. Among the interred are a Texas state representative and Amanda Sheppard, mother and grandmother of two U.S. congressmen.
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.
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.