Fairfield Female College

The college was a business as much as a school. Town leaders incorporated the Freestone County School Association in February 1858, and classes began in a new two-story building in February 1859 with about seventy girls. Henry L. Graves, a former Baylor president, bought the property at auction for $5,000 in February 1861. Graves, his family, the students and the faculty lived there with nine enslaved people who did the maintenance, housework, cooking and serving. Refugees from the war raised enrollment to about 200 but crowded the town. The Handbook of Texas says the college closed in 1889.

What the plaque says

Fairfield Female College Erected in 1858 by the Freestone School Association. Opened in 1859 with Dr. Henry Lee Graves as president. Chartered February 8, 1860.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 19 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 25 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 26 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.

More markers nearby

• James Bonner Rogers — 0.2 mi
• David Hall Love — 0.2 mi
• W.L. Moody Confederate Reunion Grounds — 0.3 mi
• Colonel Wm. L. Moody — 0.3 mi