Concrete College

The campus lay on ten acres along Coon Hollow. The main building ran 150 feet by 50 with a kitchen and dining room attached; women boarded in the Covey family's stone house and men in two-room frame buildings. The college held legislative charters in 1856 and 1873, and its best year, 1873-74, brought 250 students, 100 of them boarders from twenty counties. Graduates included Rudolph Kleberg, William Henry Crain and George W. Saunders. Measles and influenza struck in 1871 and 1872, the railroad reached Cuero in 1873, and the last class came in 1881.

What the plaque says

Concrete College (1865 - 1881) One of most respected schools in Texas in its day. Founded by the Rev. John Van Epps Covey (1821-1898), noted educator and minister. Embraced primary through collegiate levels, accepting only students over 12 years old for college work. Broad course offerings included classical and modern languages, penmanship, music (piano, guitar, violin, flute), plus homemaking and etiquette for girls. A well-attended business school taught bookkeeping, banking, commercial law, and letter-writing. Enrollment, including boarding and day students, averaged 100; peaked at 250 in 1873. On weekdays pupils rose at 5 a.m., took a brisk walk before breakfast, heard devotional services, and went to classes. Nights were reserved for study and discussion, with "lights out" at 9 p.m. Gambling, liquor, smoking, and profanity were strictly forbidden. Students wrote their lessons on slates, as paper was expensive, then recited them to the instructor. June graduation was the ceremonious occasion of public speeches and oral examinations. In 1881 the college closed after epidemics broke out and the railroad bypassed town of Concrete. Years later rock walls of main building were crushed and used to surface roads. Only rubble marks site today. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 10 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 16 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 — 20 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.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 25 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.

More markers nearby

• Dr. William Watt White — 1.4 mi
• George Washington Davis — 3.8 mi
• Hochheim (Hoch's Home) — 4.3 mi
• Cuero I Archeological District — 4.3 mi