Arney School

Arney grew up around a handful of families rather than a town. A post office opened in 1902 in the home of William D. Robinson, who served as postmaster, and another settler, C. H. Cox, gave five acres of land for a school. The post office was gone by 1912, and the Baptist church disbanded in the early 1930s. Once classes ended, the Community Club made the schoolhouse its meeting place and was still active in the 1980s. By 2000 the schoolhouse was the only maintained structure and social center left in the area.

What the plaque says

Arney School Among the early settlers in northeast Castro County were George and Jim Arney, two brothers from Missouri, for whom Arney community was named. A school was started in 1901 for the children of settlers and ranch hands. The first schoolhouse, a one-room frame structure, also housed services of Arney Baptist Church, which was organized in 1905. Arney School operated until 1953, when it was consolidated with other districts. The school building then served as a community center and polling place. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 16 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• Deaf Smith County Historical Museum — 19 mi
  Hereford's county museum in an early Catholic school: the Windmill City's pioneers, a half-dugout and caboose outside, and work by the Italian prisoners held south of town in the war.
• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 23 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 30 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.

More markers nearby

• Holy Family Catholic Church — 9.8 mi
• Home Mercantile — 9.9 mi
• Summerfield-Dameron Corner — 12 mi
• Happy Cemetery — 14 mi