Dora B. Lantrip Elementary School

The plaque names the developer and the architect but not the builder. Eastwood Elementary was built by Tom Tellepsen, born at Tvedestrand, Norway, in 1888, who by his family's account went to sea as a cabin boy, landed in New York in 1905, worked on the Panama Canal and reached Houston in 1908. He became a citizen on December 17, 1915. While building the school in 1916 he bought lots on Park Drive for his own house, a rare airplane bungalow. His firm, Tellepsen Construction Company from 1929, built Rice's 1923 chemistry building and the Shamrock Hilton.

What the plaque says

Dora B. Lantrip Elementary School Eastwood Elementary School was constructed in 1916 on land deeded by William A. Wilson, the developer of Eastwood, one of Houston's first master-planned neighborhoods. Designed by city of Houston architect Maurice Sullivan in the mission architectural style, it was the first Houston school arranged on the "cottage plan," featuring classrooms occupying a series of free-standing pavilions that were designed to be more "home-like" and less institutional. The school's first principal, Dora B. Lantrip (1868-1951), served in the position for twenty-six years and was known for her innovative school administration. During World War I, she directed the students' planting of flower and vegetable gardens at the school. Each year, Lantrip's students elected a "city council," "mayor," and "health inspector" to introduce them to the government process and public participation. During the summers of the 1920s and 1930s, Lantrip traveled throughout the world, bringing back souvenirs and costumes that students could try on each fall. The souvenirs lined the halls of the school and helped to teach the students about world geography and culture. Lantrip retired in 1942, and the school was renamed in her honor in the early 1950s. Beginning in 1975, Lantrip Elementary instituted an ecology magnet program to encourage students from all backgrounds with an interest in the specialized subject matter to attend. Students now grow flowers and vegetables in the campus greenhouse, perpetuating the science and nature focus first initiated by Dora B. Lantrip. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 1.9 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 2.6 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.6 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 3.5 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• Charles W. Luckie School — 0.8 mi
• KUHT-TV, Channel 8 — 1.0 mi
• Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church — 1.1 mi
• Fourth Missionary Baptist Church — 1.4 mi