E. H. Henry Rosenwald School

The plaque credits a Rosenwald grant, but the fund's own card for Eagle Lake shows how small that share was. The Rosenwald Fund file at Fisk University records a five-teacher school, dated 1931-32, on three acres, at a total cost of $14,000. Public money supplied $10,125. Eagle Lake's Black community gave $2,000, and the Rosenwald Fund $1,875, less than local families raised themselves. In 2020 Texas Co-op Power counted the building among the state's lost places, abandoned after Eagle Lake's schools joined the Rice Consolidated district.

What the plaque says

E. H. Henry Rosenwald School Before a school existed in Eagle Lake, African Americans were educated at home or in small churches, with some classes held in a local blacksmith shop. The first school for African-American children was located on Main Street in a room on the first floor of the old United Brotherhood of Friendship Hall. The school was later relocated to C Street. In the late 1920s, a visionary young professor, Eugene H. Henry (b. 1896), came to Eagle Lake to teach. Born in Flatonia, Henry was educated at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College, received a scholarship to Howard University and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Henry, along with others, saw the need for an African-American school in Eagle Lake. Beginning in 1917, Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck Company, began to provide matching funds for African-American schools in the South. In 1929, Eugene Henry and his supporters sought an application for a Rosenwald grant for Eagle Lake. Parents, children, churches, businesses in the black community and others responded with fundraisers and contributions. With these contributions, three and a half acres were purchased and construction of the school began in 1930 when the Rosenwald grant was received. The school was a center for African-American activities, cultural programs, sports and events. When public schools integrated in the 1960s, the school became the Eagle Lake Middle School until a new middle school was built. The E. H. Henry High School was the only Rosenwald school in Colorado County and was a symbol of vision and progress for the community and the nation during the early 1900s.(2012)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 6.5 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Stafford Opera House — 15 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 21 mi
  Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.

More markers nearby

• Rice Culture in Colorado County — 0.4 mi
• Town of Eagle Lake — 0.4 mi
• Hotel Dallas, 1912 — 0.6 mi
• Methodism in Eagle Lake — 0.8 mi