Baker Ranch School

Ranch schools like this one served a county where farming kept trying and failing. Ector County had 381 people and twenty-five farms and ranches in 1900. Farmers ginned about 800 bales of cotton in 1908, and by 1910 they had planted 588 peach trees. Cattle still ruled: in 1914 Joe Graham and Charles Price shipped 15,000 yearlings from their ranch alone. Droughts kept the farm count swinging, from 84 in 1910 to 55 in 1920, 107 in 1925 and 69 in 1929, and the population fell from 1,178 in 1910 to 760 in 1920.

What the plaque says

Baker Ranch School Since there were no public schools in rural Ector County, R.W. Smith and Teague Baker in 1906 erected an 8'x10' school building in Baker's pasture. They hired a teacher at $15 a month, plus room and board, which each furnished on alternate months. Ranch schools like this one taught not only children of ranchers, but also those of cowboys and nesters--small farmers coming west to homestead or to by land at nominal prices. Baker community later had a public school. Till the Permian Basin had good roads and buses, ranch schools served it well. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 13 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 14 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 18 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Museum of the Southwest — 20 mi
  Midland's art and science museum in the 1937 house of oilman Fred Turner and his wife Juliette, with added galleries, a children's museum and a planetarium on the grounds.

More markers nearby

• LeGrande Survey of 1833 — steps away
• Gardendale — 2.8 mi
• Emigrant Trail — 7.7 mi
• Prairie Dog — 9.6 mi