Education

Kilgore, TX

Kilgore's first public library opened in 1933, launched by two local women's clubs. Federal Depression-era programs made the permanent building possible — funded by the Public Works Administration and built with Works Progress Administration labor, it was completed in 1939 in a style modeled on the cottages of Normandy. It still serves the community it was built for.

Kingsville, TX

Many of Kingsville's early Black residents came as railroad workers, and their first worship gatherings reportedly met under a mesquite tree where missionary William Green preached. In 1908 trustees of the Mount Zion Baptist Association bought land, and on Easter Sunday 1910 nine charter members formed King Star Missionary Baptist Church, the town's first African American congregation. Its building also housed Kingsville's first classes for Black children, and by the 1950s the church joined a program in which Black and white congregations exchanged members monthly to build understanding.

New York, NY

Founded by royal charter in 1754, King's College held its first classes on this Lower Manhattan site beginning in 1755. After the Revolution, the people of New York re-established it in 1784 under a new name, Columbia College. The institution occupied this ground until 1857 before moving uptown.

Temple, TX

Nurse training began at Temple's King's Daughters Hospital as early as 1897, and formal classes started in 1903; by 1906 the hospital chartered an official nurses' school, extending its program to three years. Under leaders like director Mary Julia Putts, the school endured even the lean Depression years before a shortage of enrollees forced it to close in 1948. Its alumnae organized in 1921 and served in both world wars.

Kirk, TX

Settled in the 1870s and 80s as Elm Grove, this community was renamed Kirk when its 1887 post office honored local merchant Jepitha N. Kirk. Land donated for schools, churches, and a cemetery anchored a town that grew to several hundred people, with cotton gins, a telephone exchange, a two-story schoolhouse, and a community hall. The Depression began its decline; the school consolidated with Mart's in 1952, leaving little but a few homes and the cemetery.

Irving, TX

John W. and Jestine Gorbit farmed here by 1850, and a settlement called Gorbit grew up around them as a stop on a pre–Civil War postal route. After Ike Story opened a store and post office in 1889, confusion with a similarly named town led to the settlement being renamed Kit in 1894, and residents added a cemetery and schools. When the railroad town of Irving was founded nearby in 1903, Kit's businesses, churches, and post office drifted to the new townsite, and by the 1940s the community had faded into the growing metropolis.

San Angelo, TX

On the eve of America's entry deepening into World War II, the San Angelo Kiwanis Club launched the Little Olympics in 1942 to give grade-school children an area track-and-field competition they otherwise lacked. The event grew into a beloved annual tradition, drawing thousands of young competitors and spectators from dozens of local schools and sustained by hundreds of volunteer hours. By 2016 it had reached its 75th year.

Knickerbocker, TX

Education came early to southwestern Tom Green County, where A. P. Baze built an adobe subscription school on his farm in 1877 for children who rode in on horseback for a six-month term. As Knickerbocker grew, a frame schoolhouse replaced it about 1889, and a red-brick building with an auditorium followed in 1926. In 1895, at the urging of Dr. Boyd Cornick, a separate county school was built for children of Mexican descent; the two schools ran apart until they combined in 1948, and area schools consolidated to Christoval in 1960.

Temple, TX

Chartered on June 4, 1875 as Little River Lodge No. 401, this Masonic lodge began at Little River Academy south of Temple, meeting in a cotton gin before adding a second story to the Pleasant Valley Schoolhouse in 1879 and taking the name Knob Creek Lodge. As the area grew, the lodge moved to Temple in 1885 and, after a fire, built a hall that opened in 1906 on East Central Avenue. By 1960 it counted more than 700 members drawn from every corner of Bell County life.

Lexington, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Central Texas in the 1850s, and in 1860 sixteen of them organized a Baptist church whose first building doubled as the community's schoolhouse. The congregation weathered the Civil War and, over the decades, shifted cemeteries and sanctuaries as it joined and helped organize regional Baptist associations. Depression-era out-migration nearly emptied it, but a 1972 revival and volunteer builders gave it new life.

Klein, TX

In the 1870s, formerly enslaved people from Alabama and Mississippi settled along Cypress Creek near a store run by German immigrants, giving the community its name. Built on farming, ranching, and lumber, Kohrville supported schools for both Black and white children, and in the late 1940s the district financed a new schoolhouse for its African American students. Desegregation came in the 1960s, and the once-rural community has since been absorbed into greater Houston.

San Marcos, TX

Edward Reeves Kone spent decades in Hays County public life — as attorney, sheriff, judge, and education superintendent — and later served as state agriculture commissioner from 1908 to 1914. In 1881 he bought this bluff overlooking the Balcones Fault and about 1890 built a home in a derivative Queen Anne style. The Kone family sold the house in 1914 to cotton grower and postmaster Oran W. Cliett, who lived here until 1958.

San Marcos, TX

This Victorian home with its distinctive central chimney rose in 1886 for the family of merchant Sam R. Kone, Jr., a San Marcos businessman, Mason, and city councilman. His wife Laura had taught art at the local Coronal Institute, and their daughter Florence, an educator, spent an extraordinary eighty years under its roof. Later stewards, the Yarbroughs, carried the house's preservation into a new generation.

Kosse, TX

After evangelist Abe Mulkey's 1912 revival at the Kosse Methodist Church, town officials built a tabernacle that same year to meet growing religious needs. The $2,000 frame building — with paired windows, a wooden stage and pulpit, and a dirt floor — quickly became far more than a church, hosting dances, singings, lodge meetings, and community dinners. When the schoolhouse burned in the 1930s, students took classes here, and over time it served as a polling place and even a refuge for hurricane evacuees.

Kountze, TX

Opened in 1910 by the Trinity Valley Baptist Association, Kountze Baptist College — also called Jermany College — offered African American students a primary and secondary education at a time when such schools were commonly styled 'colleges.' Under Professor W.H. Jermany it grew from 15 students in a wooden building to an 81-acre campus with a three-story hall, a working truck farm, a teacher-training program, and courses ranging from mathematics to millinery. Financial strain worsened by the Great Depression forced it to close in 1930, but many of its graduates went on to finish college.

Orchard, TX

When Francis Smith subdivided this land in 1891, he gave four acres the next year for a school and church for Czech settlers, who named their community Krasna—"beautiful" in Czech. Families built a school in 1892 that soon joined the local district, one that also included the Connersville School for African American children, and more schools followed. Repeated flooding and storms, along with the pull of the Catholic church at nearby Wallis, eventually drew the settlers away.

Houston, TX

On May 25, 1953, KUHT-TV Channel 8 went on the air from the University of Houston as the first non-commercial educational television station in the United States. Built on the vision of regents chair Hugh Roy Cullen and station manager John Schwarzwalder, it pioneered televised 'distance education,' broadcasting courses, science and space programming, and local cultural and civic events long before public broadcasting was widespread.

Moody, TX

In 1881 Dr. P. M. Kuykendall bought this McLennan County land, and in 1900 he built a Queen Anne–detailed Victorian home from plans ordered from a St. Louis architect, complete with decorative fish-scale shingling. A prominent physician, he helped found the Moody Masonic Lodge and served on the Jefferson Academy board. He and his wife Ella and their four children made the house their home.

Johnson City, TX

Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., an educator and six-term Texas legislator, and his wife Rebekah, an educator and journalist, bought this modest 1901 frame house in 1913 and raised five children here. From its east porch in 1937, their eldest son Lyndon launched his first campaign for Congress. That race began a political ascent that carried him to the presidency of the United States.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1909 to serve Austin's growing African American community, L.C. Anderson High School became the heart of segregated East Austin—a place that, despite unequal resources, produced excellence in academics, athletics, and music. After Brown v. Board of Education, the district's "freedom of choice" plan left the school effectively segregated, and by 1971 a federal court's remedy meant closing Anderson and busing its Black students to white schools across the city. The shuttering of Austin's only Black public high school tore out a community's anchor even as it advanced integration.

Canyon, TX

Buffalo hunter turned cattleman L. T. Lester settled the high plains near Canyon in 1889 and opened its first bank in 1900. In 1904 he built this comfortable home—its fireplace mantels and marble lavatories hauled from Kansas City—which became a hub of political, social, and church gatherings. Active in civic life, Lester helped bring what became West Texas State University to Canyon in 1910.

La Grange, TX

La Grange's Masonic lodge organized in 1847, with John Murchison as its first worshipful master, and became a fixture of civic life in Fayette County. The Masons laid the cornerstone of the Fayette County Courthouse in 1891, and though the lodge briefly lost its charter to inactivity in the 1880s, it reformed in 1889 under its original number. The present lodge temple was dedicated in 1939, and its rolls have long included local judges and state leaders.

Rockdale, TX

After coal was discovered near Rockdale and the railroad arrived, mining opened the district to labor by the 1890s, and many of the workers came north from Mexico during years of revolution. Settling on land north of the tracks, these families named their community La Recluta — "recruitment" — sharecropping to feed themselves while the men worked the mines, often paid in tokens good only at the company commissary. Their story holds both hardship, including a 1913 cave-in that trapped miners for six days, and hope, embodied in La Escuelita, the little schoolhouse where children of Spanish-speaking homes were taught in English.

Easton, PA · est. 2007

On December 27, 1824, citizens of Easton gathered at White's Hotel to found a new college, naming it for the Marquis de Lafayette. The timing was no accident: the aging French general was then in the midst of his triumphant 1824–25 tour of the United States, a journey that rekindled patriotic memories of the Revolution he had helped win. Local leader James Madison Porter, who had recently met Lafayette, helped rally support for the school that became one of the nation's foremost tributes to the statesman.

Easton, PA · est. 2015

First contested in 1884 on the Lafayette College campus in Easton, the football game between Lafayette and Lehigh grew into a fierce cross-valley tradition. The two schools have met more than 150 times, and the NCAA recognizes their series as the most-played rivalry in college football. The matchup has drawn coverage from Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, and ESPN.

Lagarto, TX

Lagarto College opened in 1884 with four teachers, the only college Live Oak County would ever have, promoted by townsfolk hoping to grow their community of 500. But when two railroads bypassed Lagarto, the once-prosperous town withered and the school closed in 1895. Its two-story building was hauled away to serve out its days as a ranch house.

Iola, TX

In 1874 law partners Ben Goodrich and H. H. Boone—the latter a Texas Attorney General—donated four acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church for the scattered farm community of Lake Grove. Residents quickly raised a building used for both worship and schooling, and by 1900 a hundred students attended the Lake Grove School. The still-active cemetery, with stones dating to 1874, holds the grave of a Civil War veteran.

Dallas, TX

Lake Highlands Elementary opened in 1955 amid the postwar suburban boom that swelled the Richardson School District, its six rooms soon doubled to keep up with growth. The marker frankly records the era's segregation: before 1955 local Black children attended the separate Little Egypt School, and Richardson's schools stayed segregated until 1965, the same year a new campus for African-American students rose in Hamilton Park. Lake Highlands also became a mid-century innovator, among the first schools in the nation to teach by television in 1960.

Ames, IA

This marker records the 1916 gift of Lake LaVerne to Iowa State College by Dr. LaVerne W. Noyes, an 1872 alumnus who made his fortune as a manufacturer and inventor before becoming a noted philanthropist. Noyes's benefactions to his alma mater reflect the Gilded Age and Progressive-era tradition of successful industrialists endowing the universities that shaped them.

Burnet, TX

Chartered in December 1909 and sponsored by the nearby Robert E. Lee Lodge, Lake Victor Lodge No. 1011 held its first meeting on New Year's Day 1910 in a rented building. The Masons erected their own hall on this site in 1914 and continued meeting there through the 20th century, reaching their peak membership in the mid-1950s. In keeping with Masonic custom, the lodge has long supported charitable causes.

Petersburg, TX

Lakeview School grew from two pioneer schoolhouses — Ivey, opened in 1892, and Star, opened in 1904 — that were physically hauled together onto this site in 1914 and joined into one building. A town soon gathered around it, boasting two churches, a gin, stores, and a garage at its 1920s–30s peak. When the school closed in 1943 the community faded, leaving only a church and a foundation on the plains.

Paris, TX

Carved from Red River County in 1840 and organized the following year, Lamar County honors Mirabeau B. Lamar, second president of the Republic of Texas and a champion of public education remembered as the 'Father of Texas education.' The county seat wandered in its early years — from Lafayette to Mount Vernon before settling at Paris, a town first known by the homely name Pinhook.

McAllen, TX

Approved by the McAllen School Board in 1938 and funded through a bond election and the Public Works Administration, Lamar was built to architect Marion Lee Waller's clever pre-air-conditioning design—an L-shaped plan one room deep, with classrooms opening onto breezeways for maximum airflow. It served as a high school for only five years before a new campus opened, after which it continued as a junior high. The Spanish Colonial Revival building features a buff-brick exterior, clay-tile roof, and cast-stone detailing.

Plainview, TX

Plainview's first schoolhouse, a half-dugout sod building, went up in 1887, the year the town was founded, and doubled as a community center where local churches were organized. A Masonic-built frame structure followed, briefly styled the Llano Estacado Institute, until fire destroyed it in 1902. The reorganized school was renamed for Mirabeau B. Lamar, second president of the Republic of Texas and a champion of public education.

Lampasas, TX

The oldest public school building in Lampasas began as a schoolhouse for African American students in 1898, replaced by this limestone building erected in 1923 during the era of segregated education. For years its pupils could study only through the tenth grade locally, traveling to larger cities to finish high school, until the school was finally allowed to teach twelve grades in 1951. It closed with integration in 1963, and citizens rescued it from demolition in 2001.

Lancaster, TX

Lancaster's first log school rose in 1846 near the settlement of Hardscrabble, and as families arrived the Masonic Lodge and other buildings served the growing community. In 1868 a former Confederate gun factory became the town's first school for African Americans, and by 1876 a formal school district had organized under local trustees. Through a Female Institute, a chartered district, WPA-funded athletics, and integration in 1965-66, the town wove a continuous thread of public education.

Saratoga, TX

Born in the heart of the Big Thicket, Lance Rosier grew up in Saratoga soaking in the tales of roughnecks and pioneers at his aunt's Vines Hotel and roaming the surrounding woods. A self-taught naturalist, the man known as "Mr. Big Thicket" guided scientists, photographers, and politicians through the dense East Texas wilderness, mastering its flora and fauna along the way. He helped bridge the region's early conservation efforts, though he died in 1970, just before his dream of a protected national area came true.

Hamilton, OH

Industrialist and philanthropist Clark Lane built this octagonal library in 1866 and donated it to the people of Hamilton two years later. A son of a pioneer family that came to the Ohio Country in Northwest Territory days, Lane helped found a machine company that made Hamilton a center of metals manufacturing before turning to charitable works. Battered by the catastrophic 1913 Great Miami River flood and a later fire, the library rebuilt and expanded into a county-wide system serving western Butler County.

Cincinnati, OH

In 1829, as Cincinnati was booming into a gateway city on the Ohio River, a new Presbyterian seminary rose in the hilltop neighborhood of Walnut Hills to train ministers for the growing West. Under the leadership of the famed revivalist Lyman Beecher, Lane became more than a divinity school: in the 1830s its students plunged into the fierce national argument over slavery, and many later carried their abolitionist convictions to Oberlin and beyond. Beecher's own household on the grounds included his daughter Harriet, who would go on to write 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' — and the Stowe House still stands as a reminder of that connection. The seminary trained ministers here for a century before merging with Chicago's McCormick Seminary in 1932.

Fort Worth, TX

Italian immigrant John B. Laneri settled in Fort Worth in 1883 and rose to become a leading businessman and civic figure, founding the O.B. Macaroni Company and a private boys' school known as Laneri College. In 1904 he built this classically detailed brick home, with fine interior woodwork, in one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods, living there until his death in 1935.

Del Rio, TX

San Felipe ISD opened this two-room schoolhouse for African American students in the 1930s and ran it again from 1945 to 1956, naming it for Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. A single teacher taught as many as thirty children across grades one through eight, while those seeking high school had to travel to Del Rio or as far as San Antonio or Houston. As the district integrated, Langston School closed in 1957.

Langtry, TX

The first Langtry school stood on this site before 1900, and a 1911 building carried a bell that called children to class and neighbors to Sunday school. In this remote corner of west Texas the academic year often ran six months or less, covering reading, writing, civics, and arithmetic. The present schoolhouse, built in 1934 for ten grades, later absorbed Pumpville's students, closed in 1972, and now serves as a community center named for longtime teacher Vashti Skiles.

Marietta, OH

Built in 1824 in the young river town of Marietta, Larchmont was the home of A. Waldo Putnam, whose bride reportedly came from Memphis and never quite gave up her Southern ways under her Ohio roof. Over the generations the handsome house sheltered prominent local families and twice served as a school. Its story is a small window into the blending of North and South and the social life of an early Ohio Valley community.

Lasara, TX

Carved from the old San Juan Carricitos Spanish land grant, Lasara was laid out in 1926 by developers W. A. Harding and Lamar Gill, who fused their wives' names, Laura and Sara, into the town's. Within that first year a post office, a Union Sunday School, and a schoolhouse all took root, and the school became the community's social heart. Once a cattle-shipping point, the town settled into its role as a hub for the surrounding ranch country.

Galveston, TX

Built around 1870 as a galleried Greek Revival home for Galveston attorney Marcus C. McLemore, this house was bought in 1901 by the Society for the Help of Homeless Children to serve the city's orphaned and needy young. Businessman Morris Lasker funded a major 1912 expansion, and the following year the institution was renamed in his honor.

Ingleside, TX

When highway engineers dug for caliche near what is now Swan Lake in 1939, they uncovered one of the richest fossil deposits ever found at a single Texas site. Over the next two years, excavators recovered the remains of 42 species of Ice Age vertebrates—mammoth, saber-toothed cat, ground sloth, camel, bison, tapir, and more. The find opened a remarkable window onto the Late Pleistocene world that flourished along the Gulf Coast long before human settlement.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1976

This stately mansion on New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue was recognized on October 21, 1976, when the Department of the Interior placed the Latter Memorial Library on the National Register of Historic Places. Serving the public as a branch library, the building preserves the grandeur of the avenue's early twentieth-century residential architecture. The bronze plaque records its formal listing among the nation's protected historic places.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Laura Wheeler Waring built her career as a portrait painter in an era when few Black women found a place in the American art world. Trained in Philadelphia and in France, she captured the faces of leading African Americans and led the art department at Cheyney State College, shaping generations of students. Her portraits now hang in the National Portrait Gallery and other major collections.

London, KY

Laurel Seminary grew from an 1826 act of the Kentucky legislature that set aside land to fund education in Laurel and other counties. The land was eventually sold and the seminary opened in 1858, only to be pressed into service as a hospital during the Civil War. In 1900 Governor W. S. Taylor even convened a special session of the legislature here, and the institution carried on as a common, private, and public school into the twentieth century.

Austin, TX

Born to enslaved parents in Tennessee in 1853, Laurine Cecil Anderson educated himself at Memphis schools and Fisk University before coming to Texas in 1880 to lead a training school in Brenham. He went on to head what is now Prairie View A&M University, served as founding president of the Colored Teachers State Association, and for thirty-two years led Austin's only high school for Black students. Two days after his death in 1938, the city's school board voted to name that school in his honor.

Port Lavaca, TX

Chartered in 1848, this was the first Masonic lodge in Calhoun County, part of the wave of fraternal organizations that anchored civic life in young Texas towns. The lodge went dormant during the Civil War era, then was revived in 1886 when a lodge from storm-battered Indianola relocated to Port Lavaca after a devastating hurricane. It carried the W. P. Milby name until 1935, when its original Lavaca Lodge No. 36 identity was restored.

Lavon, TX

Between 1938 and 1940, the Lavon Independent School District replaced the community's earlier two-story schoolhouse with a five-classroom building erected through Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, with local crews rotated so every man needing work earned about $3.50 a day. Designed by architect Hoke Smith with a hardwood-floored gymnasium and lunchroom, the school was dedicated in the fall of 1941 by Congressman Sam Rayburn. After districts consolidated in 1949 it served as an elementary school and later as a factory, library, and city hall.

Florence, TX

Founded before the mid-1800s, this rural community took its name from early settler L. T. "Uncle Lee" Lawler, beloved for leasing his land free of charge so neighbors could build a school, church, and cemetery. Its first school, begun before 1872, honored land donor Edward Stevenson. Once a gathering point for pioneer families, the area is now given over to farms and ranches.

Sandyston Township, NJ

The village of Layton grew from a settlement founded by John Layton in rural Sussex County in the early 1800s. Once called Centreville, it gathered a blacksmith, a carpenter's shop and tavern, a store, a Methodist church, and one-room schools, and took its lasting name when a local petitioner won a post office in 1861.

Houston, TX

The League of United Latin American Citizens formed in Corpus Christi in 1929 to unite Texas Hispanics against discrimination while promoting education, patriotism, and equality. In 1934 more than twenty Houston men chartered Council 60 in Magnolia Park, going on to open jobs for Mexican Americans in wartime industry and the city's police and fire departments. The council backed landmark court fights—including Hernandez v. Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court—and launched the "Little School of the 400," a model for the national Head Start program.

Leakey, TX

When John and Nancy Leakey built a home and sawmill in the Frio River Canyon in 1856, they were the first to settle this remote stretch of the Hill Country—and their home soon hosted the circuit-rider services that grew into this congregation. From a schoolhouse meeting place to sanctuaries raised in 1890 and 1922, the church tracked the growth of the town named for its founding family. Easter sunrise and community Thanksgiving services have long knit it into local life.

Leakey, TX

Education in the Leakey area began in settlers' homes in the 1850s and evolved through the Floral School and Academy on land the Leakey family deeded in 1883. As county lines shifted—Edwards County, then Real County in 1913—Leakey twice served as county seat and steadily built up its schools, opening new buildings in 1922 and 1930 as surrounding rural districts consolidated in.

Leander, TX

Schooling in this part of Williamson County began in 1855 at Bagdad, a pre-Civil War community that faded once the railroad drew settlers to nearby Leander. A free public school opened there in 1893, and local business leaders formed a high school association in 1899 to sustain it. The first Leander High School class graduated in 1931, and the schools grew alongside the town.

Aquilla, TX

In October 1872, landowners deeded four acres in Hill County to a group of Methodist trustees, and tradition holds that pastor Isaac Pierce Lowery proposed the congregation's biblical name of Lebanon the following year. The first church building burned in the early 1880s, prompting members to move to the present site. An early school on the church grounds served the surrounding community well into the twentieth century.

Brownwood, TX

Organized in 1888 and named for AME Bishop Benjamin Franklin Lee, Lee Chapel gathered Brownwood's Black community first in a Baptist church and then in a brush arbor at the home of its pastor, the Rev. George E. Smith—who also founded the town's first school for Black children. In 1906 the congregation's building was moved to this site, where the church has continued to serve ever since. Its story braids together worship, education, and community survival under segregation.