Big Spring School District

The district grew up with a raw railroad town. Big Spring had about 1,200 people in 1884, with six saloons, four general stores and a weekly paper, the Pantagraph. Private schools were running by 1890, before the public school of 1898. The Big Spring Herald began as a weekly in 1904, an opera house opened in 1905, and the city incorporated in 1907 with an aldermanic government. Waterworks came in 1913. By 1914 the town had a hotel, three banks and five churches, and in 1920 its 4,273 people shipped livestock, cotton and small grains.

What the plaque says

Big Spring School District Education has been an important endeavor in Howard County since its formal organization in 1882, when the first commissioners court ordered the construction of a school building and created Howard County Common School District No. 1 in 1883. On December 14, 1901, the Big Spring School District was established and a new brick schoolhouse named Central Ward was built to house students in all ten grades. Records indicate that the county provided $40/month for a teacher for African-American students in 1902. Within the first ten years of its creation, Big Spring School District built two more elementary schools and a new high school. The discovery of oil in the Permian Basin in the late 1920s signaled an era of growth and increased school enrollment in Big Spring. In the 1930s, the Kate Morrison School for Mexican-American students and the Lakeview School for African Americans were both completed, as were three other neighborhood elementary schools. An early vocational cooperative education program in Big Spring was one of the first of its kind in the state. The 1950s and 1960s saw enrollment increases and new school construction because of the presence of Webb Air Force Base. In 1955, Big Spring became one of the first school districts in Texas to enforce the Supreme Court's decision against school segregation. Big Spring annexed the neighboring Gay Hill and Center Point school districts in 1964. Many accomplishments during its first 100 years give Big Spring schools a significant role in Howard County's educational history. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hotel Settles — 0.8 mi
  Big Spring's fifteen-story hotel of 1930, built on ranch oil money, once the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, empty and roosted in by pigeons for decades and now restored.
• Big Spring State Park — 1.9 mi
  A CCC drive looping up Scenic Mountain, a 200-foot bluff above the town that grew around the only dependable spring within sixty miles of open Llano country.
• Hangar 25 Air Museum — 3.2 mi
  A restored World War II hangar on the old air base above Big Spring, telling the story of the bombardier school of 1942 and of Webb Air Force Base, which trained pilots until 1977.

More markers nearby

• First Christian Church of Big Spring — 0.3 mi
• First National Bank in Big Spring — 0.8 mi
• Howard County — 0.8 mi
• The J. & W. Fisher Company — 0.9 mi