Site of Terrell High School
Denison, Grayson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Churches and private schools provided early educational training for African American students in Denison until 1886, when Anderson Public High School opened at 530 W. Bond Street. To meet the need for improved and centralized facilities, district trustees opened a new school at this site in 1927. William R. Wims served as the first principal for Terrell School, named in honor of Augustus H. Terrell (d. 1929), noted educator, respected civic leader and first principal of Anderson High. The original school building served all grades and included four classrooms and a small auditorium. Prominent principals Wims, Mason S. Frazier and Evans Tyree Hardeman directed the school's expansion in its formative years to serve a growing community and provide increased educational opportunities. Early teachers received low salaries, but in 1946 Sammye Taylor Savage, elementary teacher at Terrell, successfully sued for pay equalization throughout the district. Terrell students set high standards in academics, the arts and athletics. The school produced many accomplished civic, business and professional leaders, as well as performing artists and athletes. The winning traditions of Terrell's maroon and white Dragons, including state football championships in the 1940s, were a source of community pride and identity. With the implementation of integration came the close of Terrell High School, and the last class graduated in May 1967. Later used for middle and elementary school classes, the campus was razed in 2000, the year a new Terrell Elementary School opened nearby (200 yds. SE). Today, the history of the high school, in existence for forty years, continues to live on in the Terrell name and in the memories of its alumni. (2005)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Before 1886, churches and private schools carried the burden of educating Denison's African American children; that year Anderson Public High School opened, and in 1927 the district built a new school at this site named for educator Augustus H. Terrell. Under principals like William Wims and teachers who set high standards, Terrell School became a source of community pride — its maroon-and-white Dragons winning state football championships in the 1940s. In 1946 elementary teacher Sammye Taylor Savage successfully sued for salary equalization across the district, and Terrell's last class graduated in 1967 as integration closed the school.
Why it matters
Terrell High School embodies the excellence African American communities built within segregated schooling — and the legal fights for equal pay and the integration that ultimately ended these institutions.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the time this school opened its doors in 1927, Denison was a bustling railroad town in North Texas, and like the rest of the South it lived under the rigid rules of segregation. Public life was split in two, and that division reached all the way down to the schoolhouse door. For Black families, education was something you had to build and defend for yourselves, often with far fewer resources than the white schools across town received.
That effort had deep roots here. Long before any public building existed, the work of teaching Denison's African American children fell to churches and small private schools — the only institutions willing and able to do it. A public high school finally arrived in 1886, and four decades later the community had grown enough to need something larger and more central. This site was the answer.
This was the Progressive era's version of progress, and it came with hard limits. The building that rose here was modest by design — a handful of classrooms and a small auditorium meant to serve every grade at once. The ambition of the people inside it, though, was anything but modest.
People & events
The school carried the name of Augustus H. Terrell, an educator and civic leader remembered as the first principal of the earlier Anderson High. Naming a school for a man like Terrell was a statement: it tied a new generation to the people who had fought to educate the community when almost no one else would.
A line of strong principals shaped the school's early years. William R. Wims served as its first, and under him and successors like Mason S. Frazier and Evans Tyree Hardeman the campus grew to meet a growing community's needs. Teachers here worked for low pay, as Black educators across the South routinely did — until 1946, when Sammye Taylor Savage, an elementary teacher at the school, successfully sued for salary equalization across the district. It was a quiet act of enormous courage, the kind of local legal fight that added up, town by town, to something much larger.
And then there was the pride you could hear on a Friday night. The maroon-and-white Dragons became a source of identity for the whole community, claiming state football championships in the 1940s. Students set high marks in academics and the arts as well, and generations of graduates went on to become leaders, professionals, performers, and athletes.
Its place in the American story
The story of this school is the story of a paradox that ran through the whole segregated South. Denied equal funding and equal facilities, African American communities poured everything they had into their own institutions — and produced excellence anyway. Schools like this one were not just places of instruction; they were the beating heart of the neighborhoods around them.
The 1946 pay-equalization suit belongs to a wave of legal challenges that chipped away at the machinery of segregation in the decades before the more famous courtroom battles. Equal pay for Black teachers was one front in a long campaign, and every victory set a precedent and stiffened the resolve for the next fight.
The school's ending is just as significant as its beginning. When integration finally came, its last class graduated in 1967. That closing was repeated across the country: the arrival of integration, a genuine step toward justice, often meant the loss of beloved Black schools and the displacement of their teachers and traditions. Understanding both the gain and the loss is essential to understanding this chapter of American history.
If you visit
Stand at this spot and you'll need a little imagination, because the original campus was razed in 2000. What you're really visiting is a place of memory — the ground where forty years of a community's ambition was concentrated into a few classrooms and a small auditorium.
Look to the southeast, where a newer Terrell Elementary opened the same year the old buildings came down, carrying the name forward. That continuity is the point: the institution ended, but the name and the pride attached to it did not.
If you're building a road trip through North Texas history, pair this stop with a slower walk through Denison itself, a railroad town with plenty of its own past. Come here to think about the people — the principals, the teachers, the athletes, the graduates — whose story lives on in the marker's few paragraphs and in the memories of those who called themselves Dragons.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Augustus H. Terrell
- · William R. Wims
- · Sammye Taylor Savage
- · Mason S. Frazier
- · Evans Tyree Hardeman
Related events
- · School integration (1967)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fred Douglass School
Sherman, TX
Established in 1879 as one of Sherman's first three public schools and named for the great abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, this school educated the city's African American children—first in two rented houses, then in successive buildings repeatedly rebuilt after fires. Enrollment grew from about 85 students to 350 by 1907, and by the 1940s the curriculum had expanded to include African American history and vocational courses. After Sherman's schools fully integrated in 1967, the building became the district's special education facility.
Hopewell Baptist Church
Denison, TX
Hopewell Baptist Church was founded in 1874 to serve the Black community of the booming railroad town of Denison, with help from ministers across the county and members transferring from St. John Baptist Church in Preston Bend. Fire, growth, and rebuilding carried it from a first meeting place to a frame church, a brick edifice in 1891, and the present building begun in 1915. In 1950 it hosted an NAACP regional convention where future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall spoke.
Grayson Bible Baptist Church
Sherman, TX
In June 1931, evangelist John R. Rice launched a month-long revival on the Grayson County courthouse square in Sherman—the very spot where the 1870s courthouse had burned a year earlier during mob violence that killed an African American man and destroyed Black homes and businesses. Huge crowds gathered, forty people answered the call to organize a new congregation, and the Fundamentalist Baptist Church was born in July 1931, baptizing converts in a tank built on the courthouse lawn. Renamed over the decades, it became Grayson Bible Baptist Church and founded Grayson Christian Academy in 1973.
Boy Scout Troop 1 (Troop 44)
Van Alstyne, TX
Only two years after Congress chartered the Boy Scouts of America, three Van Alstyne boys got hold of a Scout storybook, and in March 1913 their troop received one of the first charters in Texas, with school superintendent W.F. Barnett as scoutmaster. The troop soon helped seed others in nearby towns and threw itself into community work, from a citywide cleanup in the 1920s to carrying the Pan American Games torch in 1959. It also became the first integrated troop in its regional council, and one founding-era member, Rae Nunnallee, stayed active for seventy years.