Austin High School, Rio Grande Campus

After Austin High moved out in 1975, the old building on Rio Grande Street became a college. Austin Community College, founded in 1972 under the school district, had been renting high school buildings for evening classes; now it opened this one as its second full-time campus, and nearly 10,000 students registered that fall, about 60 percent more than the spring before. Staff painted offices made from closets, the cafeteria became a student lounge, and the college bought an abandoned grocery store at 12th Street and Shoal Creek Boulevard for a vocational skills center.

What the plaque says

Austin High School, Rio Grande Campus In Edwin Waller's 1839 plan for the city of Austin, two blocks were set aside for schools at Rio Grande and 12th Street, then called College Avenue. The Austin school board in 1881 authorized the use of existing school facilities on the south block to house the primary grades 1-4, grammar school classes 5-7, and high school grades 8-11. Due to increased enrollment, the school board in 1916 built the John T. Allan Junior High School on the north block. In 1925 the Austin High School was moved to this location from a campus on the corner of Trinity and 9th, where the junior high was relocated. Additions to the complex here were completed later to accommodate the larger student body. The late 1920s was a time of increased student involvement for Austin High. During those years the Red Jackets girls organization and the Red Dragon drama club were formed and the student newspaper, the "Austin Maroon", began publication. In the 1930s the nearby House Park athletic fields were developed. The school name was changed to Stephen F. Austin in 1953. Used for high school classes until 1975, this site was later part of the Austin Community College system. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — 0.4 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.6 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.
• Harry Ransom Center — 0.7 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.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 1.1 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.

More markers nearby

• Pease School — steps away
• Central Christian Church — 0.2 mi
• Third Site for Travis County Government — 0.2 mi
• Zachary Taylor Fulmore — 0.2 mi