Dorchester School

Dorchester took its name from a banker. The Handbook of Texas says it was named for C. B. Dorchester of Sherman and stood on the St. Louis, San Francisco and Texas Railway, which quickly made it a trading center for area farmers. It places the town's founding in the late 1800s and its post office in 1896, years before the marker's early twentieth century and the school consolidation of about 1907. By the mid-1930s the town had an estimated 400 residents and ten businesses.

What the plaque says

Dorchester School The community of Dorchester was founded on the railroad during the early years of the twentieth century. Two one-room country schools were established to provide for the education of the children of the families who moved to the area. The Dorchester School came into being about 1907 with the consolidation of these schools. Between 1913 and 1915, a two-story brick schoolhouse was constructed at this site. Its auditorium also served as a location for community gatherings. Under U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's WPA program, a new school building was constructed in 1940. Its gymnasium served as athletic facility, auditorium, and social center, with the Halloween carnival as an annual highlight. The high school was closed in 1949, but the Dorchester School continued to provide classes for elementary grade students until consolidation with the Howe School District in 1959. For more than 50 years, the Dorchester School played a central and vital role in the town. Some of its graduates returned to the school to become educators, and many have remained in Dorchester to become community leaders. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 15 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 17 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Eisenhower State Park — 20 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Great Hanging Memorial — 27 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.

More markers nearby

• Jabez and Harriet Haning — 3.2 mi
• First Christian Church of Howe — 4.8 mi
• Town of Gunter, on Old Gunter Ranch — 7.1 mi
• City of Sherman — 7.6 mi