Centennial School

The school went up in two stages, and the second is of stone. The first, a temporary wooden building, stood on thirty acres of the Warnock land three miles north of Valera, with R. C. Moore as superintendent. After fire destroyed it in January 1940, students went to Valera while a Works Projects Administration grant paid for a rock-and-brick school, finished in 1941; its rock is said to have come from Bead Mountain. A WPA plaque on the gymnasium reads 1938-40, and the cornerstone names the trustees. Grade-school pupils kept attending their home schools.

What the plaque says

Centennial School In 1936, the Valera, Bowen, White Chapel and New Central communities established a common high school. The new centralized campus – the second rural high school in Coleman County – was named to commemorate Texas' Centennial of Independence celebrated that year. After the original frame school burned in 1940, federal grants from the Works Progress Administration helped build a new schoolhouse, gymnasium and teacherage. Consolidation created the Talpa-Centennial district in 1958 and then Panther Creek in 1986, with this campus serving as an elementary school. After a new Panther Creek school opened near Voss in 1988, this site became a cooperative alternative school and later a recreation lodge. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carnegie Library of Ballinger — 24 mi
  A 1909 limestone library with an Ionic portico in a railroad town the Santa Fe created in 1886, one of the few Texas Carnegie libraries still working in its original building.
• Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel — 27 mi
  A free museum in a Winters optometrist's office, a 1909 railroad hotel and a 1927 implement dealership, with Rogers Hornsby's hometown memorabilia and a 1912 horse-drawn cotton picker.

More markers nearby

• Valera Cemetery — 4.1 mi
• Richard A. Pauley — 4.2 mi
• Mrs. J. A. B. Miller Public Library Building — 7.4 mi
• Western Trail Marker — 7.4 mi