Yegua Center at Somerville ISD
Somerville, Burleson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
As the Somerville Independent School District (SISD) emerged from the Great Depression, the school board filed a Works Progress Administration project proposal on October 3, 1938, to build a gymnasium. The proposal was accepted and construction on the gymnasium began. Local skilled and unskilled workers quarried native stone from the nearby Yegua Creek. The rustic structure was completed on July 2, 1940, and housed a gymnasium, auditorium stage, locker rooms and lecture rooms. In 1987, the gymnasium became known as the Yegua Center. Repairs were made in 1988 and the building has been in continuous use for SISD school and community activities.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As Somerville pulled out of the Great Depression, its school board turned to the federal Works Progress Administration, filing a project proposal in 1938 to build a gymnasium. Local workers, skilled and unskilled, quarried native stone from nearby Yegua Creek to raise the rustic building, finished in 1940 with a gym, auditorium stage, and classrooms. Renamed the Yegua Center in 1987, it has stayed in continuous use for school and community life.
Why it matters
New Deal projects like this one put Americans to work through hard times and left small towns with sturdy public buildings still serving them generations later.
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Related events
- · Works Progress Administration construction, 1938-1940
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Somerville Stadium
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As the Great Depression eased, the Somerville school board partnered with the Works Progress Administration to build a football stadium locals came to call "The Rock." Around 100 area men — most with little or no masonry experience — hauled native stone and petrified wood from the Yegua Creek bottom and raised the rustic structure, finished in 1940. Since then it has hosted football, baseball, graduations, and community gatherings.
J. L. Woods' Undertaking Company
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Jebb Lee Woods arrived in Somerville in 1900 and got his start selling coffins at his uncle's mercantile store. In 1911 he became the town undertaker and opened the first funeral parlor in Burleson County, adding embalming by 1914 and using a horse-drawn hearse until 1929. His descendants carried on the business, which endures today as a family-run funeral home.
Lake Somerville
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For decades Yegua Creek was a menace, flooding 43 times in the 46 years before 1958 and destroying lives and crops. On September 22, 1962, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson turned the first shovel of earth for Somerville Dam, a flood-control project completed in 1967 that created Lake Somerville. It stands among the mid-century public works that tamed Texas rivers and reshaped rural life.
First United Methodist Church of Somerville
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Organized in 1901 with 29 charter members, this Methodist congregation began humbly — praying in homes and preaching under a brush arbor lit by members' lanterns, with a railroad "chapel car" serving as a temporary church. From that first 1903 sanctuary the congregation grew through the twentieth century to its present 1966 building on the original site.