Cornelia Graves

The school that bore her name served only the youngest. Local historian Cathey Hartmann recalled in 2020 that in the late 1950s Stephenville's schools were segregated and the high school had no Black students. Her club visited the Cornelia Graves School on Floral Street, named for the teacher in 1951, and found about a dozen elementary children. Told the older students lived with relatives in Dallas, she saw that something was wrong. By her sister's time the high school was integrated. The Washington Informer called the 2012 marker the county's seventy-fifth.

What the plaque says

Cornelia Graves The youngest of nine children of John and Laura (Fuqua) Tyler, Cornelia Tyler was born in Dallas in 1875. She attended Dallas schools and then Prairie View Normal School and Hearne Academy to earn her teaching certificate. After teaching inDallas, she moved here and was the principal and only teacher at the city's colored school (or Bethelda School) for African-American children. She taught here for nearly twenty years. She married John Graves, a civil war veteran, and the couple moved to Amarillo in 1926 due to John's diagnosis of tuberculosis. In Amarillo, Cornelia continued her career as an educator. In 1951, Cornelia Graves Elementary School in Stephenville was named in her honor. She died in Dallas in 1960. (2011)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dublin Bottling Works — 13 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 23 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 28 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.

More markers nearby

• Stephenville Masonic Lodge #267 — 0.9 mi
• Historic Brick Streets of Stephenville — 1.1 mi
• John Tarleton — 1.6 mi
• Selden — 8.1 mi