Annie Webb Blanton

Blanton's brother Thomas Lindsay Blanton represented central West Texas in Congress. Her grammar textbooks and her belief in equal rights for women helped make her president of the teachers' association. In the bitter 1918 race for state superintendent she was called an atheist and a tool of others, and she answered by tying the incumbent to the impeached governor and the breweries. In July 1918, when Texas women first voted, she won the primary by a large margin. In office she helped bring free textbooks and higher teacher pay.

What the plaque says

Annie Webb Blanton (1870-1945). Educated in the public schools of Houston and La Grange, Anne Webb Blanton began her teaching career in 1887 in the small Fayette County town of Pine Springs. In 1888 she moved to Austin, where she taught public school and attended the University of Texas. After receiving her bachelor's degree in 1899, Blanton became a member of the faculty at North Texas State Normal School in Denton. In 1916 she was elected the first woman president of the Texas State Teachers Association. Two years later she became the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas when she won the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. During her four years in office she was instrumental in the passage of much-needed progressive education legislation. Earning a master's degree in 1923 and a doctorate in 1927, Blanton became a full professor at the University of Texas in 1933./ She founded the Delta Kappa Gamma Society for women educators in 1929. Dr. Annie Webb Blanton died in 1945, leaving behind a legacy of professionalism and vision to inspire generations of Texas women. Elementary schools in Austin, Dallas and Odessa were named in her honor. She is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LBJ Presidential Library — 2.8 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 3.3 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Harry Ransom Center — 3.4 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 3.5 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.

More markers nearby

• In Memory of Thomas Christian, William Strother and Josiah Wilbarger — 0.6 mi
• Elisabet Ney — 2.2 mi
• Maud Anna Berry Smith Fuller — 2.2 mi
• University Interscholastic League — 2.6 mi