Branecky School

The 1950 annexation on the plaque came a year after Texas rewrote its school system. The Gilmer-Aikin laws, named for Representative Claud Gilmer and Senator A. M. Aikin Jr., passed the Legislature in 1949 after the first all-night committee hearing in Texas legislative history and a failed attempt to break the House quorum. They guaranteed twelve school years of nine months, tied state money to attendance, raised teacher pay and created the elected board behind today's Texas Education Agency. Statewide, some 4,500 school districts were consolidated into about 2,900.

What the plaque says

Branecky School In the mid-1930s, area residents completed a frame school building at this location. The structure replaced a smaller building named Cedar Springs School. The new school was named Branecky School, for community leaders John and Paulina (Machac) Branecky. The couple settled in this area in 1896 and donated this property for educational use. The school was a center for community events, hosting meetings, socials and dances, in addition to school activities. The Branecky School served the area until 1950, when Waelder Independent School District annexed Branecky School District #56. The school building was later razed. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 6.4 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 15 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 15 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 19 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.

More markers nearby

• Flatonia — 4.4 mi
• Robert Hancock Hunter — 4.5 mi
• Old Moulton — 4.9 mi
• Moulton — 5.8 mi