Eugenia Pickard

The sum she left was small. Eugenia Pickard's estate came to about $5,000, too little to build the school she wanted for Black children, but with interest it grew to nearly $14,000, enough for a library at Woodson. Until then Black residents of Abilene had no public library to use. A school librarian ran the room during the day and a public librarian after hours, so it served as both a school library and the community's.

What the plaque says

Eugenia Pickard A philanthropic African American woman greatly improved Abilene's minority neighborhoods. Eugenia Pickard was born in Georgia about 1877. She moved to Texas in the early 1900s and settled in Abilene. Here she owned several properties and made them available for no rent to poor families with children. She also provided places to play to African American children who had no public parks. When Pickard died in 1945, she left savings and property to the city of Abilene to be used for a new African American schoolhouse. The funds were insufficient, so instead the Eugenia Pickard Library was dedicated. Located within Abilene's Carter G. Woodson High School, it served the surrounding community as an educational and social center. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 0.7 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 13 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 13 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Abilene State Park — 18 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.

More markers nearby

• Mexican-American / Americanization School — 0.5 mi
• Willis, Thomas Middlebrook — 0.5 mi
• Claiborne Walker Merchant — 0.5 mi
• James Winford Hunt — 0.6 mi