Education

Easton, PA · est. 1947

Set where the Lehigh joins the Delaware, Easton grew at the ancient Forks of the Delaware, long a meeting ground before Europeans arrived. Surveyor William Parsons laid out the town in 1752 for the Penn family, and its councils drew colonial officials and Native delegations to negotiate the uneasy terms of frontier life. In the following century it became home to Lafayette College, cementing its place as a hub of travel, trade, and learning.

Brenham, TX

German immigrants settled the Berlin community near Brenham in 1847, and on Christmas Eve 1854 the Rev. Johann Ebinger held Washington County's first Lutheran service. He founded Eben-Ezer Church on July 1, 1855, on eleven acres donated by Ludwig C. Lehmann, with landowners giving post-oak logs and renters giving labor to raise a building that also housed a parsonage. The early pastors taught school there, making the church the settlement's spiritual and educational heart.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett bridged the worlds of education and diplomacy in the Reconstruction era. For more than a decade he led Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, one of the nation's premier schools for Black students. In 1869 President Grant appointed him U.S. minister to Haiti—making Bassett the first African American to hold a diplomatic post, a barrier-breaking role he filled through 1877 before settling here for his final years.

Carthage, TX

This congregation gathered in 1843 at Old Macedonia, three years before Panola County existed and while Texas was still an independent republic. It likely grew from the circuit-riding labors of the Rev. Littleton Fowler, one of the earliest Protestant ministers in the Republic of Texas. In 1872 a gift of land from John Henry Ross brought church, school, and cemetery together at this site, where the congregation has anchored rural life for well over a century.

Odessa, TX

The 1926 oil strike in Ector County flooded Odessa with workers and their children, and by the mid-1950s the school district needed a new high school on the city's south side. Opened in 1957 and named for Confederate general and Texas legislator Mathew Ector, the school served a student body that was predominantly Hispanic and African American. Its history became entangled in the long fight over desegregation, and rather than fully integrate, the district closed it as a high school after MALDEF's 1981 legal action.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2014

Eddie Gottlieb discovered basketball as a student in this Philadelphia neighborhood in 1914, when the sport was still young. 'The Mogul' coached the famed SPHAS for decades and, in 1946, helped found the Basketball Association of America, forerunner of the NBA. He led the Philadelphia Warriors to the league's first championship and shaped the pro game for years as its longtime schedule maker and rules chairman.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 2000

"Gettysburg Eddie" Plank turned a small-town Pennsylvania upbringing into one of the greatest pitching careers of baseball's dead-ball era. Born in Gettysburg and schooled at Gettysburg Academy, he compiled a remarkable 326-194 record from 1901 to 1917, mostly for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, winning twenty or more games eight times and helping the A's to six pennants and three world championships. He returned home to Gettysburg, where he died, and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Eden, TX

The Church of Christ took root in the young West Texas town of Eden in 1903, when residents began worshiping in the local schoolhouse and later in a purpose-built church on Broadway Street. Over the decades the fellowship split into two congregations — Broadway and Main-and-Bryan — that grew and worshiped separately through most of the twentieth century. Dwindling to about twenty-five members each by 1997, the two reunited that September as the Eden Church of Christ, continuing the traditions of their frontier founders.

Eden, TX

Eden's first schoolhouse, built in 1885, drew itinerant preachers whose sermons attracted worshipers of every faith, and out of that ecumenical mix the Methodists organized around 1904. For years they met in a Baptist building until they raised their own house of worship in 1909, welcoming even Lutheran services under their roof in 1923. A charter member turned the first spade for a new sanctuary in 1948, dedicated on Easter Sunday the following year.

Baltimore, MD

This building, erected in 1836 for the Washington Medical College, is where Edgar Allan Poe spent his final hours. Brought here ill and semi-conscious on October 3, 1849, the author and poet died four days later under circumstances that remain one of literature's enduring mysteries. The structure later became part of Church Home and Hospital and survives as the east building of the complex.

Baltimore, MD

This simple memorial marks a house connected to the final chapter of Edgar Allan Poe's life in Baltimore in 1849. The city holds several sites tied to the author's last days, reflecting how closely his memory is bound to it. Poe had lived and written in Baltimore in the early 1830s, a formative period for his craft.

Boston, MA · est. 1989

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to David and Eliza Poe, actors at the city's theater, and the marker traces his surprising Boston chapters. Here he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, and enlisted in the U.S. Army at Fort Independence in the harbor before the poverty-haunted career that produced his tales of terror and the modern detective story. He returned to lecture and to print his final tale in a Boston paper months before his death in 1849.

Baltimore, MD

In October 1833, three of Baltimore's literary gentlemen — John Pendleton Kennedy, James H. Miller, and John H. B. Latrobe — met in this house to judge a contest run by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Their unanimous choice was "MS. Found in a Bottle," written by an unknown, penniless newcomer named Edgar Allan Poe. The fifty-dollar prize, the recognition, and Poe's lasting friendship with Kennedy helped set the struggling writer on his path.

Hopkinsville, KY

Born near Hopkinsville in 1877, Edgar Cayce became one of the most famous psychics of the early 20th century, delivering thousands of trance readings that ranged from medical diagnoses to spiritual counsel. A modest, deeply religious man, he never profited from his readings and framed his work as a way to help people understand a higher purpose. He died in Virginia in 1945 and is buried here.

Fletcher, NC

Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye (1850-1896) was among the most popular American humorists of his day, a newspaperman whose comic essays and lectures delighted Gilded Age readers nationwide. He retired to North Carolina in 1891, living at "Buck Shoals," and is buried one mile north.

Edinboro, PA · est. 1968

Chartered as a state normal school in 1861, Edinboro was among the first teacher-training institutions west of the Allegheny Mountains, part of a 19th-century movement to professionalize American education. Normal schools existed to turn out qualified schoolteachers for a rapidly expanding public system. Over the following century it grew from a normal school into a teachers college and then a full state college.

Edinburg, TX

Designed by the Austin firm of Giesecke and Harris and completed in 1926, this Gothic Revival auditorium served the newly created Edinburg Junior College in the fast-growing Rio Grande Valley. With its ogee-arched windows and ornamental stonework, it stood as both a place of learning and a cultural center for the wider city. It remains a fine example of the ambitious educational architecture of the early twentieth century.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

For more than half a century, Edith Hay Wyckoff chronicled life on Long Island's Gold Coast from the newsroom of The Locust Valley Leader, the weekly paper she edited and published from the close of World War II until 2001. In an era when few women owned or ran newspapers, she made the Leader a record of her community's births, deaths, controversies, and small triumphs. In 1946 she also founded the Locust Valley Boys Club, extending her civic reach from the printed page to the lives of local youth.

Canton, TX

Born into slavery in 1850, Edmund Arnold Wynne came of age just as emancipation transformed the South. By 1869 his father had bought 100 acres, and Edmund followed, purchasing his own land and then selling parcels for a dollar to Black churches and schools across the Big Rock and Canton areas. Over a lifetime he helped former slaves and struggling families become self-sufficient, supported teachers, and lent his name to the Wynne community, one of the oldest African American communities in Texas.

Austin, TX

University of Texas economist Edmund T. Miller and his wife Emily, an artist descended from San Antonio's pioneer Maverick family, acquired this Austin hillside in 1922. Emily herself co-designed their Mediterranean-style home, completed in 1923, working alongside her nephew and an architecture professor and calling on metal craftsman Fortunat Weigl for its details. The house was built to embrace its slope and still keeps much of its original landscaping.

Edna, TX

In the early twentieth century, upheaval in Mexico and Texas's hunger for farm and industrial labor drew many Mexican families north, and their children entered a school system that often segregated them from Anglo pupils. Edna's Mexican School offered only grades one through four for six months a year in a spare wood-frame building; teacher Luna Lucille Lindberg pushed her students toward achievement from 1933 to 1948. The school closed in 1948, the same year the Delgado v. Bastrop ISD ruling struck at the segregation of Mexican American students in Texas.

Denton, TX

In 1915 Edna Westbrook Trigg became the first county home demonstration agent appointed in Texas, taking up her Denton County post the next February. For more than two decades she traveled the county teaching farm women gardening, canning, sewing, and household management, overcoming resistance to both government advice and a woman working in "a man's world." During World War I she pushed agricultural self-sufficiency, urged Liberty Bond purchases, and ran Saturday canning schools, even borrowing county funds to buy communal steam canners.

Edom, TX

The Methodist congregation at Edom traces its worship to the eve of the Civil War and organized formally in 1874 under the Rev. D. L. Lake. A singing school begun in 1866 and a Women's Missionary Society formed by 1914 wove music and outreach into its life, and the fellowship carried on through a succession of wooden and, later, brick sanctuaries. Renamed Edom United Methodist Church in 1968, it marked more than seventy years on the same ground in 1997.

Hunt, TX

Around 1915, the Hunt School brought together earlier one-room schools that had served families along the North and South Forks of the Guadalupe River. Rising enrollment and repeated floods pushed the community to build anew, farther from the water, in 1926, and residents voted to form their own school district in 1934. Though older students transferred elsewhere for decades, the Hunt School still serves its community today.

Industry, TX

German settlers founded Industry in 1831, and within a decade Rev. Louis Ervendberg and Dr. Joseph Anton Fischer opened the town's first school, with residents even petitioning the Texas Congress in 1842 for a German 'Hermann's University' that was chartered but never built. Steeped in Germany's tradition of free education, the community helped drive Texas's public-school movement, later building both a new school and a separate Mary Bethune School for African American children before integration folded them into Bellville ISD.

Livingston, TX

Education took root in Livingston from the town's 1840s founding, when Moses Choate's land donation included a site for a school and the Masonic lodge financed a free academy in 1849. A graded school followed in 1888, growing into Livingston High School, whose first class graduated in 1908. The story also traces the town's separate Black schools—including Dunbar High—through the Freedom of Choice program that began integration in 1965 and full unification by 1968.

Austin, TX

Schooling in the community of Manchaca began with an 1870s subscription school in a one-room frame building on Onion Creek and a public school held in the 'Old Rock Church' by the early 1880s. The 1881 arrival of the International and Great Northern Railroad drew new settlers, and in 1883 a brick schoolhouse with a bell tower rose east of this site, later gaining a second story, cafeteria, and auditorium. As across the segregated South, separate schools served African American and Mexican American children until the district integrated in the 1960s and was ultimately absorbed by Austin ISD.

Round Rock, TX

Not long after Williamson County was organized in 1848, blacksmith Jacob M. Harrell built a log schoolhouse for his neighbors — thought to be the county's first school. From those rough beginnings the Round Rock area steadily built a fuller educational system: the Greenwood Masonic Institute in 1867, the first publicly supported school in 1878, and later Trinity Lutheran College. In 1913 residents incorporated the Round Rock Independent School District, which grew under long-serving superintendents into a district known for both expansion and quality.

Raleigh, NC

Edward A. Johnson was a many-sided figure in turn-of-the-century Black America, working as a politician, businessman, philanthropist, author, and educator. He became the first Black author to publish a schoolbook in North Carolina, writing Black history into the classroom. His home stood on this site.

Rayne Township, PA · est. 1996

Edward Abbey, one of America's fiercest literary defenders of wild country, was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in 1927 and grew up around the village of Home. Though he made his name writing of the desert Southwest in Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, works like Appalachian Wilderness and The Journey Home return to the green hills of his native county, where he first learned to love the natural world. He moved west in 1948 and died in Tucson, Arizona, in 1989.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002

The paleontologist and zoologist Edward Drinker Cope lived and worked in this Philadelphia neighborhood in his later years, producing a torrent of scientific papers that described hundreds of fossil and living species. He is best remembered for the "Bone Wars," his fierce, decades-long rivalry with Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale to unearth and name new dinosaurs. Their competition, however bitter, dramatically expanded American knowledge of prehistoric life.

Village of Nyack, NY

This Nyack house, built in 1858 by the grandfather of Edward Hopper (1882–1967), was the birthplace and boyhood home of one of America's greatest realist painters. Even after moving to New York City, Hopper returned to the family home throughout his life, and the quiet light and architecture of his Hudson River town echo in his spare, contemplative canvases. Local citizens rescued the house in 1970 and founded a preservation society to keep it.

Houston, TX

Born Chen Yuk Chow in San Francisco, Edward K. T. Chen came to Texas in 1932 as a consular official for the Republic of China and settled in Houston, where he earned degrees and became the city's first Chinese American professor. He worked tirelessly to raise the standing of Chinese Texans, helping defeat a 1937 bill that would have barred Chinese from owning land and, during the Korean War, defending the loyalty of Chinese Americans while translating intelligence and teaching Cantonese to FBI agents. In 1954 he founded the Houston lodge of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance to fight the prejudice directed at his community.

Giddings, TX

Built around 1890, this American four-square house was home to attorney Edward R. Sinks, Lee County's first state district judge and a founding director of its first bank. His parents, George and Julia Sinks—both friends of Sam Houston—lived out their later years here. George had served as first chief clerk of the Republic of Texas Postal System, while Julia Lee Sinks was a pioneering amateur historian and charter member of the Texas State Historical Association.

Town of Dryden, NY

In the rolling farm country of Dryden, New York, the Eight Square School House is one of the rare octagonal schoolhouses built during the mid-19th-century craze for eight-sided buildings. Octagonal architecture, popularized by phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler, was promoted as healthier and more efficient, letting light and a single stove reach every corner of a one-room classroom. Generations of local farm children learned their letters and figures here before the era of consolidated districts.

El Campo, TX

El Campo's schooling began around 1891 in a simple wooden building, and the independent school district was organized in 1895, its early classrooms scattered among a church, a restaurant, a store, and a Swedish school. Brick schoolhouses rose and were replaced across the decades as the district consolidated rural schools and, in 1961, merged with the Crescent district. Integration was completed by 1968, and by 1994 the district served more than 3,500 students of varied backgrounds.

El Campo, TX

El Campo's reading life began with a library association in 1902, grew into a public library at the downtown fire station in 1927, and found a permanent home in this crisp Moderne building completed in 1940 after a Wharton County Library branch opened in town. Its streamlined entryway, light fixtures, and signage marked it as a proud product of its era's design. When the library outgrew the space in 1965 it found new purpose, becoming a community art center in 1983.

El Paso, TX

Completed in 1916, El Paso High School was the city's first purpose-built high school and remains its oldest surviving one. The noted firm Trost and Trost designed a classical-revival landmark in the foothills of the Franklin Mountains, folding the athletic field into the academic plan and adding then-novel touches like a rooftop garden, a cadet armory, and skylit laboratories.

Mendocino County, CA

This bronze plaque designates Elder Creek in the remote California Coast Range as a Registered Natural Landmark, recognized in 1964 by the National Park Service under the Historic Sites Act of 1935. Elder Creek is a rare, undisturbed watershed valued for illustrating the natural history of the United States, and it has become one of the nation's most closely studied pristine streams. The marker reflects the mid-20th-century federal effort to identify and protect landscapes of exceptional scientific value.

Waverly Township, PA · est. 1948

Born in Connecticut in 1775, Elder Miller joined the stream of New England settlers who pushed into northeastern Pennsylvania's Abington region around 1800. On his own farm he hosted the township's first church and its first school, serving his neighbors as both preacher and teacher until his death in 1857. His homestead became the seedbed of community life on a raw frontier.

Patroon, TX

North Carolina preacher William Brittain and his wife Rosanna, drawn by the promise of frontier missions, migrated to the Republic of Texas in 1837 and raised a log cabin here. One room served as classroom and chapel for the settlers of the Sabine River steamboat port of East Hamilton. A pioneer Baptist leader, Brittain helped found several Shelby County congregations and served as moderator of the Sabine Association in 1847. When steamboat traffic ended the town faded, leaving only this cemetery on the site of the Brittains' home and chapel.

Elgin, TX

Chartered in 1870 as Perryville Lodge No. 328 in the nearby community of Perryville (or Hogeye), this Masonic lodge moved to Elgin in 1877 and took the town's name in 1901. Its first two halls did double duty as public schoolrooms, a common arrangement in frontier Texas where fraternal orders often provided the earliest space for education. The absorption of neighboring McDade Lodge in 1934 reflects the shifting fortunes of small rural communities.

San Antonio, TX

In 1877, former Confederate officer and Virginia legislator Elias Edmonds and his wife Lucy built one of the first houses in San Antonio's new King William neighborhood. Elias practiced law while Lucy ran a "high school for young ladies" on the grounds of their home. The handsome two-story limestone house later passed through prominent physicians and realtors, with one family living here for more than four decades.

Euless, TX

Elisha Adam Euless left Tennessee for Tarrant County in 1867 and became one of the men whose enterprise shaped its rural map. A successful cotton-and-corn farmer and elected constable and later sheriff, he bought land around a two-story grange hall whose lower floor served as school and church, and later acquired a tract with a cotton gin. The community that grew up around the gin and grange took his name, and a post office opened as Euless in 1886.

Crockett, TX

The son of an American Revolution veteran, Tennessee-born Elisha Clapp came to Texas in 1822 and served in a cavalry company at the Battle of San Jacinto during the Texas Revolution. He captained mounted rangers on the frontier and, in 1837, was among the petitioners who organized Houston County, later receiving a captain's commission from President Sam Houston. He also helped found and served as an early trustee of Trinity College in the Alabama community before moving on to Leon County, where he died in 1851.

New York, NY

This chapel stands on the site of the home where Elizabeth Ann Seton lived with her family from 1801 to 1803 and where her daughter Rebecca was born. A wife, mother, and educator, Seton went on to found the Sisters of Charity, the first American congregation of religious sisters. In 1975 she was canonized as the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint.

Elizabeth City, NC

Elizabeth City State University began in 1891 as a state-supported normal school to train Black teachers, part of the wave of institutions founded across the South after Reconstruction to educate a rising generation of African Americans. It grew into a four-year college by 1939 and attained university status in 1969, tracing the long arc from segregated teacher-training school to full public university.

Elko, NV

Elko was born of the railroad at the very end of 1868, when Central Pacific crews staked out lots that filled almost overnight, and within two years thousands of people made it a bustling freight and passenger gateway to the mining country north and south. It even hosted the University of Nevada from 1874 until the school moved to Reno in 1885. By the 1870s Elko had become the marketing heart of northeastern Nevada's vast rangelands, home to cattle barons and governors alike, and it remains the region's economic hub and host of the celebrated Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

Del Rio, TX

In 1916 the local chapter of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks raised this meeting hall to plans by builder Martin Brauer, replacing an earlier structure on the site. Its Prairie Style influence shows in the low hipped roof, overhanging eaves with exposed rafters, paired French doors, and a balcony on brick piers. For decades the hall hosted lodge meetings, dances, and community gatherings until the Elks built a new home in the 1980s.

Belton, TX

Elm Grove Baptist Church traces its roots to a 1911 revival held at the Elm Grove School near Belton, a building that had hosted several congregations for some twenty years. When the school closed in 1915 the Baptists kept meeting there until 1999, sustaining a ministry marked from the start by outreach — collecting clothing and toys for needy children and supporting a local food pantry and clinic. The congregation has also long served as a training ground for ministerial students.

Ponta, TX

Elm Grove was a Freedmen's community — settled by formerly enslaved people after emancipation — and by 1884 it had a place in the Cherokee County school system. Classes first met in a local church and in homes until the 1890s, when residents built a one-room schoolhouse on land donated by R.B. and Caroline Wood, raising it with their own donated materials. A 1917 merger swelled enrollment and the interior was divided into three rooms, until the school closed and consolidated with Rusk in 1957.

Mabank, TX

This East Texas congregation traces its roots to a log building raised in 1875 on settler Anthony Gray Hyde's land, where church, school, and community all gathered under one roof. After the school moved and took the name Elm Grove, the church settled here and has since been shared by Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist congregations who worship separately but run a joint Sunday school.

Longview, TX

This East Texas congregation grew out of Sunday School classes that Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church began holding in the Spring Hill Schoolhouse in the late 1880s. Organized in the 1890s under its first resident pastor, the church took its name from Elmira Castleberry, matriarch of a prominent pioneer family whose sons served as founding elders and donated land and materials for a combined school and church building in 1897-98. The congregation remained active in community and missionary work for generations.

Edinburg, TX

Hidalgo County native Emilia Schunior Ramirez graduated from Edinburg High in 1919, raised a family, and earned her degrees while building a career as a teacher and principal across Rio Grande Valley schools. Her 1950 master's thesis studied the children of Mexican immigrants in South Texas, and she went on to teach Spanish at Pan American College and to represent Edinburg at an inter-American meeting in Guatemala. She became a respected educator and historian.

Amherst, MA · est. 1963

This Amherst house was the lifelong home of Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet who, in the 1850s and 1860s, quietly wrote nearly 1,800 poems that almost no one saw in her lifetime. Working in near-total privacy, she forged a startlingly modern voice of dashes, slant rhyme, and compressed intensity. The federal government has recognized the home as a National Historic Landmark for its exceptional value to American history.

Blowing Rock, NC

Emily Prudden left New England to spend her later years founding schools across the mountains of western North Carolina, establishing some fifteen institutions—several serving Black and Appalachian students who otherwise had little access to learning. Her Skyland Institute once stood on this site at Blowing Rock, and one of her foundations became a forerunner of Pfeiffer College.

Eminence, KY

Chartered by the Kentucky Legislature as a high school in 1856, this institution became Eminence College in 1861 and grew into one of the state's earliest coeducational boarding schools, where men and women were equally represented. Under the long presidency of Rev. W. S. Giltner from 1858 to 1893, it added a commercial department and a normal school for training teachers, with enrollment peaking near 200 before it closed in 1895.

Orange, TX

Widowed young, Emma George Latchem came to Orange in 1871 and began teaching two years later in a private school, joining the public system when it opened in 1884. Over forty-two years in the classroom she also helped found a mothers and teachers club in 1908 to improve conditions for her students, retiring only in 1915.

Plainview, TX

Born in Tennessee and brought to Texas as a child, Emma Grigsby Meharg became a teacher and, with her educator husband, a fixture of Plainview civic and church life after 1902. In 1925 she won lasting renown as the first woman to serve as Texas Secretary of State, appointed by Miriam A. Ferguson, the state's first woman governor. Her rise came just five years after American women won the vote, placing two women at the top of Texas government in a single stroke.

Orange, TX

Born in Waxahachie in 1876 and trained at Prairie View College, Emma Henderson Wallace came to Orange in 1901 as one of four teachers at the Orange Colored School, which met inside local Black churches. She joined the public school faculty in 1914 and in 1933 became principal of Moton High School, building up its library, athletic courts, band, choir, and student clubs over thirteen years. In 1946 the school was renamed Emma H. Wallace High School in her honor, a lasting tribute to a career devoted to educating Orange's African American youth.