Ector High School

The school opened in a county that had multiplied many times over in a generation. Ector County held 3,958 people in 1930, 15,051 in 1940 and 42,102 in 1950, and it reached 90,995 in 1960, three years after Ector High School opened its doors. Oil drove the growth: by the mid-1940s the county had more than 2,000 producing wells, and in the 1950s the nation's largest petrochemical complex took shape near Odessa. Odessa itself rose past 80,000 people during the 1950s and 1960s.

What the plaque says

Ector High School With the discovery of oil in Ector County in 1926, the area saw a continuous influx of people to work in the oil fields. As the general population grew so did student enrollment in area schools. As a result, on March 10, 1955, the Ector County Independent School District (ECISD) school board approved plans for a new high school to be built on a twenty-acre tract of land in the 800 block of West Clements Avenue on the south side of Odessa. The final plans called for a 164,052-square-foot building with thirty-two classrooms, an auditorium, band hall, gymnasium, library, cafeteria and workshops. Named after General Mathew Ector, a Civil War veteran and Texas legislator, the new high school opened in the fall of 1957. Prior to the school's opening, ECISD established a student committee to select a mascot and school colors. Students selected the Eagles and Columbia blue and white respectively and Ector High School officiall opened September 3, with an enrollment of 306 students. Being considered a 'minority school,' Ector's students were predominately Hispanic and African American. Beginning in 1974, the community of South Odessa began exerting pressure on the school district to fully desegregate. In 1981, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) filed a civil action to force ECISD to completely desegregate their schools. Instead of desegregating, Ector closed as a high school and became a junior high school while the current secondary students were sent to the other two area high schools. Ector High School's existence saw many successful athletic accomplishments including two state titles in basketball and one in track, produced many distinguished alumni and created multiple community leaders and social activitists. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.8 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 8.2 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 12 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Site of The Dawson Saloon — 0.9 mi
• Odessa Telephone Exchange — 1.0 mi
• Odessa Land & Townsite Company — 1.0 mi
• Waddell Pecan Tree — 1.0 mi