Booker T. Washington School

Gainesville created a public school system in 1882, and the school for its Black children got its own frame building in 1886, first as the Gainesville Colored School. The 1939 replacement was a red brick Works Progress Administration project, one of the federal relief jobs of the Depression. It educated Black students until desegregation in 1965 and 1966 ended its life as a Black institution. By the summer of 2014 the building was being slowly demolished, according to the Living New Deal survey, so the marker may now stand where the schoolhouse no longer does.

What the plaque says

Booker T. Washington School In 1880, two years before the City of Gainesville created a public school system for all its children, Island Sparks, a young mulatto, taught the Black children of the city. In 1886, the city built a frame school building on this site for the community's Black youth. Originally known as the Gainesville Colored School, the school adopted the name Booker T. Washington sometime before 1927. The original two-story facility was replaced in 1939 with a red brick, WPA project structure. Desegregation in 1965-66 resulted in the closing of Booker T. Washington as a Black institution. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Great Hanging Memorial — 0.8 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.
• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 22 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 24 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• American Paint Horse Association — 0.4 mi
• Gainesville Community Circus — 0.4 mi
• Cooke County — 0.4 mi
• Cooke County, C.S.A./2nd Frontier Regiment — 0.4 mi