Ash Creek (Pelham) School

A Rosenwald Fund card in the Fisk University collection records the money behind the 1921 schoolhouse. The card lists a total cost of $6,000, with $1,200 from the Black community, $3,600 from public funds and $1,200 from the Rosenwald Fund. It shows a three-acre site, a four-teacher plan and 1921-22 as the year established. The program required matching money, which the Handbook of Texas says could come as cash, materials or labor, and in many places Black men cut lumber, hauled it and worked as carpenters.

What the plaque says

Ash Creek (Pelham) School Ash Creek School District No. 105 began in 1899 in the historically African-American Pelham community. School was held in Wesley Chapel Church until 1908, when a two-story schoolhouse was built near the Pelham Cemetery. The first principal was T. J. Douglas. The Pelham School operated for all 12 grades, allowing students to attend colleges and universities after graduation. In October 1921, trustees bought three acres for a new school partially funded by the Rosenwald Foundation of Chicago. The new schoolhouse had four large classrooms and two smaller rooms. In 1962, a new Pelham school building opened. The high school closed in 1965, and three years later all grades consolidated with Dawson Independent School District. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 19 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 22 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 23 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 27 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.

More markers nearby

• Pelham Community — steps away
• Brushie Prairie Methodist Church — 4.0 mi
• Near Site of Trading Post of Dr. George Washington Hill — 5.1 mi
• Salem Lutheran Church — 5.2 mi