Van Common School
Van, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1916, Swindall and Spring Hill Schools were consolidated to form Van Common School. Money raised with a bond election and state aid enabled the district to build a new school on five acres less than one mile east of Van. In order to reduce costs, community members agreed to haul at no expense 114 wagon loads of construction materials to the building site from the railhead at Grand Saline, 13 miles away. The school opened with 95 students and four teachers: Prof. E.C. Tunnell, Prof. E.R. Tunnell, Miss Eula Fowler and Miss Lucy Brawner. The school served the needs of the community until a May 1928 fire destroyed the building. A June ballot measure approved the issuance of bonds in the amount of $3,000. This amount and the $3,500 insurance payment enabled the district to rebuild a school that was ready for the start of the 1928-1929 school year at the same site. The 1929-1930 school year began with 90 pupils. However, the discovery of oil on October 14, 1929, less than a mile from the school, dramatically changed the school district as well as the entire community. School administrators and board members knew that they needed to plan ahead for massive community growth. Another contribution to the disruptions in the school district’s operations was the oil drilling on school property, approximately 500 feet from the building. The school building was temporarily moved to an adjacent site, but an election was held in 1931 in order to secure funding for a greatly expanded school site to accommodate the population explosion that occurred as a result of the discovery of oil in Van.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Van Common School was formed in 1916 by merging the Swindall and Spring Hill schools, with neighbors hauling 114 wagonloads of building materials thirteen miles from the Grand Saline railhead to hold down costs. It opened with 95 students and four teachers and served the rural community until fire destroyed it in 1928; residents quickly funded and rebuilt on the same site. Then, in October 1929, the discovery of oil less than a mile away transformed the district and the whole community almost overnight.
Why it matters
The school's fortunes capture how the East Texas oil boom could turn a quiet farming district into a booming community, reshaping local institutions in a single season.
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Related events
- · Discovery of the Van oil field
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Van School, 1929-1947
Van, TX
The 1929 discovery of the Van oil field swelled the local school from a five-room country building into a modern campus within a few years. While Depression- and war-era districts elsewhere slashed budgets, oil revenues let Van expand rapidly—enrollment leapt from 90 students in 1929 to 611 the next year—adding brick elementary and high schools, a gymnasium, buses, an athletic park, and a teachers' home. The Pure Oil Company aided the boom with free water and gas and a cash donation, and building continued through World War II.
Duck Creek Soil Erosion Project
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In the depths of the Dust Bowl era, the United States awoke to soil erosion as a national emergency, and in 1929 one of the country's first ten erosion-control research stations was established near here. By 1934 the surrounding Duck Creek watershed became a working demonstration where landowners across 25,000 acres adopted planned conservation—terraces, dams, tree and grass plantings—much of it built by a nearby Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The project drew visitors from across the nation and trained a generation of agronomists, foresters, and engineers who carried its methods to other states.
Harry W. Meredith
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Harry Meredith arrived in Mineola around 1907 from Kentucky by way of a Kentucky brick plant, and spent the next half-century shaping the town from behind a banker's desk, serving as bank president, board chairman, and briefly as mayor. Late in life he turned his fortune toward the public good, and the Meredith Foundation he organized still funds the town's library, civic center, and youth and church programs. His home once stood on this site, a fixture of the community he reshaped.
Swindall School
Van, TX
In the 1880s the scattered farms around present-day Van had no school within reach, so farmer George W. Swindall donated an acre for a community school around 1880, and both the school and settlement took his name. Beginning with a single teacher, T.W. Staton, it grew to two and then three instructors and became part of the Van school district organized in 1903. By 1916 the aging, crowded building was closed and consolidated with Spring Hill into the new Van Common School.