Site of Valley View School
Kamay, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Area families established the Denny and Jones Dale schools in 1897. In 1918, the schools combined, and J.A. Kemp and R.S. Allen sold land to the trustees of Wichita County School District No. 6 at this site to build the Valley View School. The next year, oil discovered in the Kemp-Munger-Allen (KMA) field brought many new residents. In 1924, the completion of lakes Kemp and Diversion, and the creation of a farm irrigation district, influenced even more growth. Two years later, with 325 students in grades one through eleven, the school opened a larger building, and voters created the Valley View Independent School District in 1928. Local African American students attended school at the Wichita County Rural Colored School, which operated on the Munger farm from 1925 to 1942. In the 1930s, the Valley View School student population increased, peaking in the 1937-38 school year with nearly 600 students. The district added new buildings as needed, including a second brick structure completed as a federal project in 1942. In the 1950s, however, with the mechanization of farming and a decline in the oil industry, the area's population began decreasing. The Eagle Bend School merged into the Valley View district in 1956, and although it completed new facilities in 1968, the district consolidated with Iowa Park in 1970. The Iowa Park Consolidated Independent School District utilized former Valley View facilities for several years, but most have since been dismantled. The significance of the Valley View School continues, though, in the lives of those who were students here over the years. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Valley View School grew out of two 1897 country schools that merged in 1918, just as the 1918 discovery of the Kemp-Munger-Allen oil field and new irrigation lakes flooded rural Wichita County with families. Enrollment swelled to nearly 600 by the late 1930s, and the district built and rebuilt to keep pace. As farm mechanization and the oil industry's decline thinned the population, the district consolidated with Iowa Park in 1970 and its buildings were eventually dismantled.
Why it matters
The school's rise and fall traces how the Texas oil boom reshaped rural education — and the marker's note that Black students were sent to a separate 'Rural Colored School' preserves the record of segregated schooling in the same district.
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