Education

Baytown, TX

In the depths of the Great Depression in 1934, voters of the Goose Creek school district chose to found Lee Junior College, betting on higher education when money was scarce. Its first 177 students paid under $15 a semester and met at night in a high school, and four women made up the 1935 graduating class. Renamed Lee College in 1948, it became a pioneer in prison education in 1966 with courses inside the Texas Department of Corrections aimed at reducing recidivism.

Asheville, NC

From 1844 to 1879, Colonel Stephen Lee ran a respected classical preparatory school for boys at Chunn's Cove, offering the Greek and Latin education that prepared young men for college and public life. The school stood half a mile north.

Leechburg, PA

In the prosperous years after World War I, the industrial river town of Leechburg invested in a grand new schoolhouse to match its growing ambitions. Designed by New Castle architect W.G. Eckels and raised between 1922 and 1924, the building wore the dignified columns and symmetry of the Classical Revival style then favored for civic landmarks across America. Opened with 23 classrooms and dedicated that September of 1924, it became the educational heart of the Leechburg Area School District.

Leesville, TX

Settled before the Civil War, the Gonzales County town of Leesburg — later Leesville — was a busy trade center when this one-room brick schoolhouse went up in 1868, with the site deeded to the Leesburg Male and Female Institute in 1873. Everything came from close by: red bricks fired in a nearby kiln, lumber from the Daniel Brown Sawmill on O'Neill Creek, and labor from local residents. Classes ran until 1918, after which the building served as community center, lunchroom, and even a private home before being restored.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 2015

The rivalry between Lehigh and Lafayette began in 1884 at Lafayette College and became a defining fixture of the Lehigh Valley. Meeting more than 150 times, the two schools hold the NCAA's recognition for the most-played rivalry in college football. The annual clash has been chronicled in national outlets including Sports Illustrated and the New York Times and broadcast on ESPN.

Lela, TX

Lela sprang up around 1902 along the proposed line of the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf railway, and residents quickly organized a school, first known as Story. When flooding forced the community uphill, the school moved with it, and the discovery of natural gas in the 1920s brought new prosperity and a brick schoolhouse. After nearly ninety years, the Lela district closed in 1992 and merged with nearby Shamrock.

Hertford County, NC

A Baptist leader in the years just after emancipation, Lemuel W. Boone organized North Carolina's first Black Baptist association in 1866, giving newly freed congregations a shared institution of their own. He also served as a trustee of Shaw University, one of the South's early colleges for African Americans. His grave lies about two miles southeast.

Fannett, TX

Leo Edward Craigen's life traced the arc of the post-Civil War South. Wounded at the bloody Battle of Shiloh in 1862, he lost a leg to surgery yet returned to serve with the Confederate cavalry until the war's end. He rebuilt an ordinary but rooted life in Jefferson County, Texas — teaching at the Taylor's Bayou School, marrying one of his own students, and finally carrying the rural mail through the Fannett area for the last fifteen years of his life.

Brazos County, TX

The Leonard School opened in the late 1890s on land donated by Sam Luther, serving a farming community of Polish, German, and Czech immigrants drawn to the rich soil of the Brazos River bottoms. Its two rooms, divided by a movable partition, doubled as a community hall for dances, weddings, and elections, and the school year bent around the cotton harvest so children could help their families in the fields. Lacking running water or electricity until the 1930s, the humble schoolhouse served for half a century before consolidation sent its students to Bryan in the 1940s.

Polkton, NC

Born on this site in 1837, Leonidas L. Polk became one of the South's great champions of the farmer. He founded the influential newspaper The Progressive Farmer in 1886, led the national Farmers' Alliance, and helped establish the schools that grew into NC State University and Meredith College. His advocacy gave voice to rural people during the agrarian upheavals of the Gilded Age.

Corydon, IN

Built in 1891 as the Corydon Colored School, this building educated African American children in southern Indiana at a time when schooling was rigidly segregated. It served as both an elementary and secondary school, holding its first graduation on May 14, 1897. In 1987 it was renamed for Leora Brown Farrow, who taught there from 1924 to 1950 and gave the school much of its enduring identity.

Wysox Township, PA · est. 1967

Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913) spent his youth in this corner of Bradford County, working alongside his brother Cyrenus in a small hub factory before the Civil War, in which he served. He went on to become a pioneering geologist and paleobotanist and the founding figure of American sociology, arguing that human societies could be improved through reason and planning. So sweeping was his intellect that admirers dubbed him "the American Aristotle."

Martins Mill, TX

Lexie Dean Robertson, raised in Martin's Mill where her educator father opened a school he named Lexie Academy after his eldest daughter, became in 1939 the first native-born Texan named Poet Laureate of Texas. A schoolteacher and principal before she turned to writing full time, she won a national readership with homespun collections such as Red Heels (1928) and Answer in the Night (1948). She held the laureateship until 1941 and later served as Poet Laureate of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs.

Lexington, TX

Chartered in 1854 when Lexington still lay within Burleson County, this Masonic lodge took its first name from Andrew Neill, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence. Its members did more than meet: they helped raise a building that doubled as a school, chartered in 1860 as the Lexington Male and Female Academy, and later sponsored an Order of the Eastern Star chapter. The lodge has remained a fixture of community life for well over a century.

Lexington, TX

Lexington's first school met in 1849 in the log home of town founder Capt. James Shaw, and by 1854 patrons of the local Masonic lodge joined the new school district to raise a two-story schoolhouse-and-lodge hall south of town. It became the Lexington Male and Female Academy in 1860, and a succession of frame and brick buildings led to the campus begun in 1936. The school's story binds together the town's founding, its fraternal life, and its schooling.

Jefferson, TX

In April 1874, eight charter members gathered in the East Texas town of Jefferson to organize what became Liberty Baptist Church, worshiping at first in a shared Union Church building that doubled as a school and Methodist meeting house. Briefly renamed Harmony Baptist in the 1890s, the congregation reclaimed its original name in 1898 and expanded the old building over the years as it grew.

Kilgore, TX

This rural Gregg County community was settled before the Civil War and carried a string of colorful names — Sabine, Mount Moriah, McCrary's Chapel, Goforth, and Hog Eye, the last for a settler with a keen eye for hogs. It took the name Liberty City in the opening days of the fabled East Texas oil boom, which transformed the county's economy. The area built its reputation on good schools, farming, ranching, and an admired network of all-weather county roads.

Frankfort, KY

John Brown began this Georgian mansion in 1796, naming it for the Virginia academy he had attended, and its garden hosted what is remembered as the first Sunday School west of the Alleghenies, started by his wife Margaretta and Elizabeth Love. Brown (1757-1837) was a Revolutionary War veteran and aide to Lafayette who read law with Thomas Jefferson before becoming one of Kentucky's first two U.S. senators. Presidents James Monroe and Zachary Taylor, Andrew Jackson, and Lafayette himself were among the guests welcomed here.

Charlotte, NC

In 1777, as the Revolution raged, the newly independent North Carolina legislature chartered Liberty Hall, an academy in the Carolina backcountry near Charlotte. It grew out of earlier local efforts to found a college — a school the crown had refused to charter under royal authority. Founding a place of learning in the middle of a war for independence was a bold act of confidence in the new nation's future.

Houston County, TX

George W. Wilson brought his family from Kentucky in 1835 to what became the Liberty Hill neighborhood of Houston County, joined by other pioneer families. The community never platted a townsite or won a post office, but it grew a school that doubled as a house of worship, Baptist and Methodist congregations, and a handful of general stores. As people left the countryside for cities after World War II, Liberty Hill faded, sustained afterward by an annual homecoming and a 1960s community center.

Liberty Hill, TX

Founded in 1854, this Methodist congregation began building a three-story native-stone structure in 1870 on land given by T. S. Snyder, sharing the space with a school and a Masonic lodge. The upper stories were later removed and wings and a vestibule added over the following decades, including a 1954 memorial window honoring the founding families. It remains a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Henderson, TX

Organized in the Sugar Hill community in 1866, in the first year of freedom after Emancipation, Liberty Missionary Baptist Church joined the Mt. Zion Baptist Association in 1868 and built a new sanctuary beside its original church and school in 1897. Membership climbed from 68 in 1927 to a record 159 by 1945, and the congregation affiliated with the Baptist Missionary Association at every level around mid-century. A modern facility replaced the earlier buildings in 1991, continuing a tradition of worship and outreach.

Greenville, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, a group of Greenville women turned a book-lending idea into a lasting civic institution. Beginning in 1897 with a literary circle whose members each donated volumes, they opened a small circulating library that soon outgrew its shelves; a $15,000 pledge from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie underwrote a permanent building that opened in 1904. The library has moved and grown ever since, eventually taking the name of local historian W. Walworth Harrison.

Austin, TX

Raised in Jamaica by European parents who steeped them in languages, the classics, and music, Josephine and Lilia Casis came to Texas in 1890 and gave their lives to education. Josephine taught for thirty-three years at Austin's Palm School, while Lilia pursued graduate study in Europe and at the University of Texas, where in 1916 she broke ground as the university's first woman full professor. The sisters left their estates to the university, and in 1951 an Austin school was named in their honor.

Dallas, TX

In the depths of the Jim Crow era, Dallas needed a modern high school for its Black students, whose only option had been the overcrowded Booker T. Washington campus miles away. Backed partly by a New Deal Public Works Administration grant, Lincoln High School opened in January 1939 with 1,255 students and a striking Moderne building whose glass-brick tower became a neighborhood landmark. Under founding principal Tueria Dell Marshall, enrollment surged past 3,000, and the school produced more than 200 educators among its distinguished alumni.

Lower Oxford Township, PA · est. 1967

Chartered in 1854 as the Ashmun Institute, this school was founded by the Rev. John Miller Dickey to provide higher education to men of African ancestry at a time when almost no such opportunity existed in America. Renamed Lincoln University in 1866, it opened its doors as an interracial and international institution. It became one of the nation's first degree-granting historically Black colleges, educating generations of leaders across the United States and Africa.

Gatesville, TX

Shortly after the Civil War, freed people in Coryell County founded a community four miles west of Gatesville and named it Lincolnville in honor of Abraham Lincoln. Experienced farmers and ranchers, the founding families lived off the Leon River valley's catfish and game while building the institutions long denied them—Bethlehem Baptist Church, organized in 1872, and eventually Lincolnville School No. 62, which served the county's Black children until rural schools were consolidated in 1943. Despite racial strife and frontier hardship, the community endured, and a few descendants of its founders remain today.

Bowie, TX

Named for the Lindale School District, this Montague County burial ground was established in 1880 when the Gibbins family sold a single acre to school trustees for four dollars. The graves gather generations of the farming families — Cooper, Griffin, Thomas and others — who settled the Lindale community, along with veterans of both World Wars. By the close of the century more than 250 graves marked the site.

Lititz, PA · est. 1980

Founded in 1746 by the Moravian Church in the tight-knit religious community of Lititz, Linden Hall is the oldest girls' resident school in the United States. The Moravians, German-speaking Protestants known for their devotion to education, believed girls deserved rigorous schooling at a time when few Americans agreed. What began as a day school grew after 1794 into a boarding academy drawing students from far and wide, and was chartered under its present name in 1863.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Lindley Murray was born in 1745 in a house along Indiantown Creek, where his father Robert briefly ran a mill. He grew up to become one of the most influential grammarians in the English-speaking world; his English Grammar, first published in the 1790s, was reprinted countless times and drilled into generations of schoolchildren on both sides of the Atlantic. From these modest Lebanon County beginnings came the author whose rules of usage governed classrooms for the better part of a century.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Near this spot in 1745 Lindley Murray was born, the son of Robert Murray, who kept a mill here for a short time. Murray became the most widely read grammarian of his age, and his English Grammar shaped how students were taught to read and write for generations. A boy from the Pennsylvania backcountry thus became a household name in schoolrooms across America and Britain.

Greensboro, NC

In 1875 Greensboro opened the Lindsay Street School, the first permanent public graded school in North Carolina, in a building on this site. Graded schools sorted students by age and progress—an innovation that helped build the modern public education system in a state still recovering from the Civil War. Its founding marked an early commitment to tax-supported public schooling in the postwar South.

Houston, TX

Completed in 1912 for businessman John Wiley Link, this Neoclassical mansion was the first house finished in Montrose, the Houston subdivision Link himself developed. Oilman Thomas P. Lee bought it in 1916 and commissioned later alterations, giving the grand portico and ornate terra cotta its final form. Since 1947 it has served as the centerpiece of the University of St. Thomas.

Bay City, TX

By 1894 Matagorda County counted twenty African American schools serving more than 700 children, and Bay City's first — a donated one-room frame building — grew into a school named for Booker T. Washington. Among its long-serving teachers was Linnie McHenry Roberts, a Prairie View–educated educator who taught elementary classes for 32 years and earned wide respect for her care of students and community. In 1961 the school board opened a modern brick school and named it in her honor, a building that still stands as a tribute to her legacy.

Lipscomb, TX

Soon after Lipscomb was founded around 1886, residents met in 1887 to organize a school district, and the first classes met in a former Dunkard Church bought by the trustees. A two-story frame schoolhouse followed in 1908, and after lightning burned it in 1922 a brick building rose in its place, complete with library, office, and auditorium. The high school graduated its last class in 1941 before consolidation and rural decline finally closed the school in 1975.

Denton, TX

Dr. Priestly Lipscomb and his wife Molly Binyon had this one-story frame cottage built by J.C. Thornton in 1895 on then-bustling West Oak Street — a modest Victorian Folk house among grander Queen Anne neighbors. In 1920 W.T. Doggett, superintendent of Denton's city schools, bought it and added Craftsman-style exterior touches, though the original bois d'arc pier-and-beam foundation survives unchanged. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2016.

Dallas, TX

In 1870, two landowners gave five acres for a church and burial ground at Lisbon, then a small pioneer town south of Dallas. A combined church and school rose the next year, and after the school closed and the churches moved away, the site endured purely as a cemetery. Descendants of the founding families organized to preserve it in 1948.

Ganado, TX

The Little School of the 400 grew from a bold idea: teach Spanish-speaking children roughly 400 essential English words so they could succeed in first grade. In 1957, Ganado high schooler Isabel Verver read of LULAC president Felix Tijerina's wish for such a program, wrote to him, and taught the pilot class that summer, graduating sixty children before the fall term. Its success spread to towns across the region and helped inspire a state-funded preschool program that later foreshadowed Head Start.

Austin, TX

George W. Littlefield came to Texas as a boy in 1850, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, and emerged a major who turned to the cattle business, amassing great ranches across New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. Settling in Austin in 1883, he moved into banking and served as a regent of the University of Texas, funding buildings, scholarships, and library collections. He built this Victorian residence in 1894 and left it to the university on his death.

Brenham, TX

Founded in 1853 by Presbyterian minister James W. Miller, Live Oak Female Seminary in Brenham offered schooling to female boarding students and day students of both sexes until 1888. Miller's sister-in-law Rebecca Stuart Red served as principal until 1875, when she left to open her own seminary in Austin. The campus centered on Miller's home, "Oak Lodge," whose upper floor held classes alongside dormitories, an auditorium, and a music conservatory.

Salisbury, NC

Founded in 1879 as Zion Wesley Institute by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, this school became Livingstone College in 1885 and was named for the British missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Under the Rev. Joseph Charles Price, its president from 1882 to 1893, it grew into a leading center for educating African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. It stands five blocks west.

Llano, TX

In 1901 music teacher Jennie Clopton gathered sixteen women to found a literary society that grew into the Woman's Culture Club, a civic force in Llano for decades. The club opened the town's first public library, funded scholarships, beautified public spaces, and coordinated a Works Progress Administration project to build a permanent library in 1938–39. It embodied the Progressive-era conviction that organized women could shape the life of a community.

Teague, TX

Llewellyn Notley (1888-1970) was a Texas-born educator and scholar who took bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Texas and spent more than four decades, from 1912 to 1953, as a teacher and school administrator. In his later years he devoted himself to local history, chairing the Freestone County Historical Survey Committee and helping lead a railroad museum association. His civic and historical work earned him a string of awards.

San Antonio, TX

In 1934 the Works Progress Administration built this limestone auditorium on the old Locke Hill school grounds, its walls raised by federal workers from stone cut at a nearby quarry. Answering the county superintendent's push for better schools, the building became a gathering place for the whole community. When postwar growth outran the campus, the school was rebuilt nearby in 1976, but the New Deal auditorium remained as a reminder of a hard time when public work put people to build lasting things.

Lockett Community, TX

Named for the Lockett families who settled here in 1888, this Wilbarger County farming community grew from a scattering of pioneer homesteads into a network of schools, churches, cotton gins, blacksmith shops, and general stores. Farming that began behind a yoke of oxen gave way over the decades to modern tractor equipment, and the Lockett Seed Company grew into a hub later acquired by Pioneer Hi-Bred as a cotton-breeding headquarters. Consolidating school districts and a Texas A&M agricultural research center capped the community's evolution across nearly a century.

Lockhart, TX

Built in 1923 for Lockhart's African American students—reportedly with materials salvaged from a former white school—this two-story brick and stucco schoolhouse was designed and partly funded through the Rosenwald Foundation, with the district and Black citizens raising the rest. Before it opened, Black children had studied in scattered churches, lodges, and even a funeral parlor. Accredited in 1926 and renamed G.W. Carver High School in 1946, it closed with integration in 1964 and later housed a Head Start program.

San Antonio, TX

One of the oldest public schools in Texas, Lockhill has taught children continuously since 1868, when classes were first held in a former supply depot. It took its name from William J. Locke, who donated the land, and for a time was called 'Shavano.' The present building went up in 1923, and in 1985 the school's marker, gates, and archway were moved from the original site a mile away to keep the history close.

Elmo, TX

Founded in the 1800s, Locust Grove grew into a typical East Texas farming community with a sawmill, stores, a doctor, three churches, and a two-story building that doubled as schoolhouse and Baptist church. A post office opened in 1893 under postmaster James Hiram Hughes, and the community was later renamed Hiram in his honor. Today the Locust Grove Baptist Church, whose 1919 church house still stands, and its cemetery are the community's remaining landmarks.

Warminster Township, PA · est. 2008

Around 1735, the Reverend William Tennent built a humble log schoolhouse here and began training Presbyterian ministers — the first academy of its kind in America and the first college in Pennsylvania. Detractors mocked the rustic building as a "Log College," but it became a seedbed of the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. When Tennent died in 1746 the school closed, but its graduates soon helped found what became Princeton University.

Russellville, KY

Financed by a property tax passed in 1869, this Russellville jail replaced an earlier lockup that had burned and opened by December 1874. For more than a century it served as the county's symbol of law and order before closing in 1977. Restored in 1979–80, it now safeguards county records tended by the local genealogical society.

Jacksonville, TX

Founded in Kilgore in 1875 by pioneer educator Dr. Isaac Alexander, this Methodist school became the oldest junior college in Texas. It moved to Jacksonville in 1894, operated as a junior college from 1912, and was renamed to honor Pittsburg banker R. A. "Lon" Morris in 1924. It was the first Texas junior college with a Phi Theta Kappa scholarship chapter and among the longest-standing members of the Southern Association of Colleges.

New London, TX

Founded in 1856 in the piney woods of East Texas, London Baptist Church took root in a frontier era when congregations often shared quarters — here with an Odd Fellows Lodge in a building along the Henderson-to-Waco stagecoach road. Fire claimed the structure in 1877, but the congregation rebuilt in 1897 and thrived when the great East Texas oil strike of 1930 turned sleepy London into a boom town. Through fire, rebuilding, and sudden petroleum prosperity, the church remained a fixture of community worship and outreach.

Llano, TX

Among Llano County's early rural schools, Lone Grove sat on a main road between Llano and Burnet and grew important enough to become district number two when the county was divided in 1884. The surviving schoolhouse dates to 1910 and, in 1937, was one of only two county rural schools to offer high-school courses before consolidating with Llano in 1947.

Palestine, TX

This congregation traces its beginnings to worshipers who gathered in the early 1890s in a schoolhouse at a spot known as Rocky Point. When the church bought land in 1903, a single pine tree standing on the property gave it the name Lone Pine Baptist Church, and the congregation was formally organized in 1908 with thirty-four charter members under the Rev. A. M. Thompson. From a dirt-floored "tabernacle" built in 1920 the church grew steadily, dedicating a new auditorium in 1957, and it has served the community for well over eight decades.

New Summerfield, TX

Founded before the Civil War with the earthy nickname "Skin Tight," this community took the name Lone Star when its post office opened in 1883 and blossomed into a center of trade, education, and culture. At its height it boasted businesses, a public school, four churches, two lodges, and the Lone Star Institute. A devastating 1893 fire, a railroad that passed it by, and disappointing oil prospects each drained away its future.

Hermleigh, TX

Named for the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf, whose people ranged across this stretch of West Texas until the 1870s, this community took root when settler John Mahoney donated land for a cemetery and school. A one-room schoolhouse rose in 1901, doubling as a church, and a store, post office, and scattered farms soon followed. The little settlement gradually faded as its school consolidated, but its pioneer cemetery, with graves dating to 1892, still serves area families.

Lometa, TX

Founded in 1876 as Sims Creek Baptist Church by the noted early Texas minister Noah T. Byars, this congregation of eight charter members grew under a succession of itinerant preachers. For decades it worshipped in the Long Cove schoolhouse, which doubled as the community's social hub until fire claimed it in 1925. A wooden sanctuary followed, but by 1981 the dwindling flock voted to disband, leaving a cemetery holding Civil War and World War II veterans among the rural pioneers.

Marquez, TX

Named for the pioneer Long family, this Leon County settlement of farm families centered on a school built in the 1880s that doubled as church and community hall. When it burned in 1918 neighbors rebuilt it larger together, and a store so small that customers were served through a window kept the community supplied — until the school consolidated with Marquez in 1929 and the little store closed with it.

Boston, MA

This spot honors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the 19th-century poet whose verses were once memorized in classrooms across America. His poem "The Bridge," published in the 1845 collection "The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems," imagines a figure pausing at midnight on a river crossing, watching the tide and turning private sorrow into quiet reflection. Longfellow lived nearby in Cambridge, and the Charles River he crossed still runs beneath the bridge that now carries his name.

Longview, TX

Opened in 1930 on Gum Street as the Longview Negro High School, this campus gave African American students a secondary education in the era of legal segregation. Rebuilt after a 1946 fire and later renamed for beloved teacher Mary C. Womack, it produced graduates guided by principals honored in the East Texas Black Educators Hall of Fame. A federal desegregation order finally closed and razed the school.