Progressive & Modern Era

Waldo Mathews High School

Silsbee, Hardin County, Texas

Marker Inscription

At the turn of the 20th century, Silsbee became a very busy mill town due to the success of the railroad connecting Silsbee and Beaumont. Many jobs were provided for both white and black settlers. A school dedicated to the education of African American students quickly developed, organized by the reverends J.R. Dunbar and W.H. Jermany. Professor Waldo Mathews, who served as principal for more than 15 years, watched the school grow from two teachers to a staff of eight. In 1921, Mr. J.C. Frazier of Newton County was hired and served as principal for 28 years. In 1922, a six-room building and workshop was built utilizing the Julius Rosenwald fund to replace the old facilities. On May 1, 1939, the county school board stated that Waldo Mathews (Silsbee Colored) was given eleventh-grade classification – the only African American School in Hardin County listed. With Professor C.A. Johns as prinicipal, Waldo Mathews developed into one of the best educational systems in the area. By 1967, all of the schools of the Silsbee Independent School District had fully and voluntarily integrated with no incidents. Waldo Mathews High School was destroyed by a fire on January 9, 1970. The outer buildings, elementary school, cafeteria and field house were then demolished, leaving the foundations which can still be seen today. In 2003, Texas parks and wildlife approved a grant petitioned by the city of Silsbee for the construction of a park named Waldo Mathews city park in honor of Waldo Mathews high school. A large pavilion stands where the high school once stood.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

As the railroad turned Silsbee into a busy mill town at the turn of the 20th century, Black settlers organized a school for their children, guided by Reverends J.R. Dunbar and W.H. Jermany. Under principal Waldo Mathews it grew from two teachers to eight, and in 1922 a new six-room building rose with help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. By 1939 it was the only African American school in Hardin County to earn eleventh-grade classification, and Silsbee's schools integrated peacefully by 1967.

Why it matters

The school reflects the Rosenwald Fund era, when Black communities and philanthropy together built thousands of schools that opened education to the segregated South.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

When the railroad linked Silsbee to Beaumont at the turn of the twentieth century, it turned a spot in the piney woods into a busy mill town almost overnight. The timber economy needed workers, and it drew both white and Black settlers into Hardin County for the jobs the mills and the rail line created.

But this was the segregated South, and the schoolhouse was as divided as everything else. Black children were barred from white schools and left to whatever their own community and a chronically underfunded county system could provide. Across the region, that usually meant Black families organizing and paying for education themselves, often meeting in a church before there was ever a dedicated building.

Into that gap stepped a national experiment in philanthropy. In these same decades, a fund established by a Northern businessman partnered with Black communities across the South to build schools — the community raising money and often the labor, the fund matching it. The results, thousands of modest schoolhouses, transformed Black education in the rural South, and one of them would rise in Silsbee.

People & events

The school began the way so many Black institutions of the era did — organized by ministers. Reverends J.R. Dunbar and W.H. Jermany got a school for African American students going as the town boomed. Its early growth is measured in a single vivid statistic: under Professor Waldo Mathews, who served as principal for more than fifteen years, the school grew from two teachers to a staff of eight.

In the early 1920s a new principal arrived and would stay for nearly three decades, and a six-room building with a workshop went up using the Julius Rosenwald fund to replace the old facilities. That building was more than bricks; it was a statement that the community intended its children to be educated properly. By the end of the 1930s, the school had earned eleventh-grade classification from the county board — and was the only African American school in the county to hold it, a hard-won marker of academic standing.

Under later leadership the school developed into one of the strongest in the area. When the local district integrated at the end of the 1960s, the marker records that it happened fully, voluntarily, and without incident. The school building itself did not survive long after — a fire destroyed it, and the outbuildings were taken down, leaving foundations still visible on the ground. Years later the city secured a state grant to build a park on the site, so that the name would endure where the school once stood.

Its place in the American story

Waldo Mathews High School is a ground-level view of one of the most important stories in American education: how Black communities in the segregated South built and defended their own schools against long odds.

The Rosenwald partnership that raised its 1920s building was a national movement. Across fifteen states, a philanthropic fund and thousands of Black communities together financed schoolhouses at a moment when public money for Black education was scandalously thin. Those schools educated a generation and helped seed the leadership of the civil rights era. A single six-room building in Silsbee is a thread in that enormous fabric.

The school's later chapters carry the rest of the century's story. Earning the county's only eleventh-grade classification for a Black school speaks to a community insisting on full, real education, not a token version. And the peaceful, voluntary integration of the district — in an era when integration elsewhere met mobs and federal troops — is its own quietly remarkable footnote to the national struggle over school desegregation.

If you visit

There is no schoolhouse left to tour, and that changes how you visit. What survives are the foundations of the old campus, still readable in the ground, and a park built to honor what stood here. Walk it knowing that children learned, played, and graduated on this exact spot for the better part of a century.

Look for the outlines the marker describes — the traces of a school that a community built and rebuilt for itself. A large pavilion now stands where the high school once was. Standing there, it's worth remembering that a park like this is an act of memory: the town chose to keep the name alive rather than let the site go anonymous.

This makes a meaningful stop on a route through Silsbee and Hardin County, especially paired with the town's other markers of its mill-town and African American history. It's a place that rewards a little quiet reflection — a green space that carries more history than its picnic tables let on.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

· Waldo Mathews
· J.R. Dunbar
· W.H. Jermany

Themes & tags

African American History EducationSchool

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