The Savage Schools
Malone, Hill County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Three schools in this area were referred to as Savage School. The first, built on land donated by George W. Savage in 1885, was a one-room facility where classes were scheduled around students' farm work. The second, built in the Walling community, closed in 1920 after its students began attending class at the original Savage School, which had moved into larger quarters at this site. The third, Savage Colored School, served black students in the area until they transferred to Pelham School in nearby Navarro County. The last Savage School closed in 1950.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Three schools in this Hill County area carried the Savage name, beginning with a one-room school on land donated by George W. Savage in 1885, where classes bent around the rhythms of farm work. A second school in the Walling community later folded its students into the growing original. A third, the Savage Colored School, taught Black children of the area until they transferred to Pelham School in neighboring Navarro County, and the last Savage school closed its doors in 1950.
Why it matters
The clustered Savage schools, including a separate school for Black students, lay bare both the reach and the racial divisions of rural public education in the segregated South.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · George W. Savage
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ash Creek (Pelham) School
Frost, TX
Founded in 1899 in the historically African-American community of Pelham, this school first met in the local Methodist chapel before a two-story schoolhouse rose near the cemetery in 1908. Uncommon for a rural Black school of its era, it taught all twelve grades, sending graduates on to college. In 1921 its trustees drew on the Chicago-based Rosenwald Foundation—Julius Rosenwald's landmark partnership with Southern Black communities—to build a larger school, which served until consolidation in the 1960s.
Peabody School
Hillsboro, TX
In 1885 Hillsboro issued a bond to build a school for African American children in the Black neighborhood known as Freetown, naming it for George Peabody, whose fund famously aided Southern education after the Civil War. A brick building replaced the original frame structure in 1919, and the school moved to this site in 1950. Its last class graduated in 1966 as full integration approached; though the building burned in 2005, Peabody School remains a point of community pride.
George Washington Savage
Malone, TX
Born in Tennessee in 1826, George Washington Savage came to Texas in 1847 and made his mark as a farmer, race-horse breeder and trainer, and Confederate cavalryman. He eased the way for German immigrant families by selling them parcels and helping them start farms, and in 1885 he donated land for Savage School No. 1, the area's first school. At his death in 1899 he left a second wife and ten children.
Graham-Mason Cemetery
Irene, TX
When William and Sarah Graham came from North Carolina to settle here in 1856, they brought a household that included enslaved people, some of whom are believed to be buried in and around this ground. The oldest marked grave belongs to their six-year-old granddaughter, buried in 1866. The site is bound up with Abe Mason, a Tennessee-born Confederate veteran wounded at Shiloh who married into the family and became one of Hill County's largest landowners.