Ezzell School

Ezzell is the oldest settled corner of Lavaca County. Families from Stephen F. Austin's colony came between 1830 and 1836 and traded at Petersburg, six miles north, until Sam and Ira Ezzell opened a store during the Civil War. The Handbook of Texas records that a private school here was taught by literate enslaved people, a school that necessarily predates emancipation. After the war, classes met in church buildings until 1883. The county's tax rolls counted 379 enslaved people in 1850 and 1,606 by 1860, more than a quarter of the population.

What the plaque says

Ezzell School In the early 1850s pioneers of this area erected a building 2 miles north of this site which they called White House Christian Church and School because of the contrast its lime coating presented against the surrounding green prairie. In 1883 the school was moved to a building in the community of Ezzell on land donated by Andrew Garner. It was the community's first public school and was named Ezzell for local merchants Sam and Ira Ezzell. In 1922 a new 4-room school building was erected at this site on land donated by Dr. E. A. Evans. Three additional acres were purchased from L. A. Bishop in 1923. In 1925 students from the nearby Live Oak School began attending Ezzell School. Ezzell's three teachers and nine grades served more than 100 pupils in 1935. Prior to World War II the Ezzell School building also served as the site for draft registrations. Unlike many area rural schools which closed during the 1950s and 1960s, Ezzell continued to grow as the area it served expanded. In 1975 a new wing was added to the east side of the building to accommodate more students. In 1989 three classrooms, a science lab, and several physical education facilities were added. Today Ezzell operates as an elementary school. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 12 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 19 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 27 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.

More markers nearby

• Joel Ponton — 2.5 mi
• John Himes Livergood — 6.8 mi
• The United Methodist Church of Hope — 7.4 mi
• Petersburg — 7.6 mi