Bristol School

The Handbook of Texas gives Bristol two earlier names. Joshua W. Brock settled in the early 1840s, and from 1854 to 1869 the post office was called Brockville. Dancing was popular enough that the community was for a time unofficially called Heelstring. The Sparkman family built a steam gristmill, a sawmill and a cotton gin in the late 1860s, and a log building that served as church, school and lodge room went up in 1870. The Bristol post office opened in 1872. By 1890 the town had a bank, two churches and an elementary school.

What the plaque says

Bristol School The community's first school was housed in a multi-purpose building erected here in 1870. The Bristol School district was established in 1877. Youth from throughout the area attended Bristol schoolhouse built in 1886 and 1913. A new brick school containing five classrooms and an impressive auditorium and stage was completed here by the U.S. Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1940. 130 pupils attended the 9-grade, 6-teacher school in 1940-41. The school served the area until 1955. In 1957 its facilities and grounds were deeded to the Bristol Cemetery Association. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 17 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 25 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Fair Park — 25 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 25 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.

More markers nearby

• First Christian Church of Palmer — 6.1 mi
• First Baptist Church of Palmer — 6.2 mi
• Rosser Depot of the Texas Midland Railroad — 6.7 mi
• Telico Cemetery — 7.3 mi