Woodland College for Boys
Kirvin, Freestone County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established in 1863. Enrollment more than 300 students. Colonel L. R. Wortham donated ten acres of land for use as a campus, church and cemetery. Charter trustees: Col. L. R. Wortham, Thomas Lamb, Dr. Rueben Anderson, Oliver Carter, John I. Winn, D. L. Carter, Noland Womack, T. L. Sessions, G. A. Sessions. Prof. Hellery Moseley was its only president. Mattie, Mary and Thomas Dixon were its teachers. The college became a grade school at the close of the Civil War. Discontinued in 1905 and moved to Kirvin.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1863 during the Civil War, Woodland College for Boys drew more than 300 students to a ten-acre campus donated by Col. L. R. Wortham, alongside land for a church and cemetery. Prof. Hellery Moseley served as its only president, teaching with a small faculty that included Mattie, Mary, and Thomas Dixon. As the war closed the college dwindled to a grade school, and it was discontinued in 1905 and moved to Kirvin.
Why it matters
A frontier boys' college born in the middle of the Civil War shows how fiercely rural Texans valued education even as the country tore itself apart.
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Related people
- · Luther R. Wortham
- · Hellery Moseley
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church and School
Kirvin, TX
In the early 1850s, enslaved people in this part of Freestone County worshipped under a brush arbor at informal services. After emancipation the congregation formally organized as Freedmen in 1866, electing Boney Moffett their first elder, and a school inspired by the church followed about a year later. Shiloh became the "mother church" of a wider Primitive Baptist association and still serves its community today.
Shanks Cemetery
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Two brothers from Alabama settled here with their families in 1859, and a small farming community grew up around a school built in 1870 on donated land. The adjoining ground became a public burial place known as Shanks Cemetery after the local post office opened in 1896, and a cemetery association has cared for the site since 1935.
Grange Hall Community
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Settlement here began in the 1850s just as Texas carved Freestone County from Limestone, drawing farming families who soon threw themselves into the Grange movement — the national agrarian organization founded in 1873 to give farmers cooperative power. A local resident, Joseph Burton Johnson, served as the first master of the statewide Texas Grange, and the community renamed itself for the two-story hall its members built in 1877 to house both Grange meetings and a public school. The building passed to school and church trustees and served the neighborhood, in various rebuilt forms, into the 1980s.
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Education in Wortham began in the 1870s as a cooperative effort of the Masonic Lodge and the Methodist church, with ministers teaching from donated books, before the first public school opened in 1883. In 1891 Wortham became the first independent school district in Freestone County, and the discovery of oil in 1924 transformed a town of 1,000 into a boomtown of 20,000 nearly overnight — swelling one classroom from 18 pupils to 84 in just four days. The system grew by absorbing rural schools and, in 1966, merged the F. W. Wheeler School for Black students into a single district.