Former Site of Dowdy School

A gymnasium came to Dowdy School with an oil boom. In eastern Guadalupe County the oil came from the Darst Creek field, discovered on July 18, 1929 by the Texas Company's No. 1 Dallas Wilson. Fourteen operators drilled offsets along a fault less than a mile wide, and by February 1930 forty-four wells were complete. The field was the first in its part of Texas to run under proration, with allowables set by a field umpire who arrived that December. It yielded almost 107 million barrels before the Railroad Commission split it into two fields in 1960.

What the plaque says

Former Site of Dowdy School After the Wolters and Nixon School Districts merged in 1916, school trustees acquired 2 acres here from William Dowdy and erected the Wolters-Nixon School building. A gymnasium and classrooms were added in the early 1930s after an oil boom boosted the local economy. In 1932 the school was renamed Dowdy and offered high school classes for the first time. Despite a steady decline in student enrollment after 1938, the high school continued and students excelled in various team sports. Dowdy School was annexed to the Seguin School System in 1951. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palmetto State Park — 12 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 21 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 22 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.

More markers nearby

• Wilson Potteries — 3.8 mi
• El Capote Ranch — 5.2 mi
• William B. Fleming — 6.5 mi
• Battleground Prairie — 6.6 mi