Forney Independent School District

The plaque dates Forney's first school to about 1868; the Handbook of Texas says the town's first public school was built in 1874, so the sources differ by six years. The Handbook also records two schools the marker never mentions. A Black school opened in 1890, in the era of legal segregation, and Forney Academy, a private coeducational school, was established by 1894. The district's 1899 formation and 1903 brick building came after both, so the story began with three kinds of school, not one.

What the plaque says

Forney Independent School District Public education began in Forney (then named Brooklyn) about 1868 when a 16' x 16' room was built, serving as both a schoolhouse and Union church. Forney School District No. 9, formed in 1876, was part of a county-wide school system. In 1889 the first structure was replaced by a 2-story wooden school building. In 1899 the Forney Independent School District was formed. An imposing brick and stone building superseded the wooden structure in 1903. The present edifice was erected in 1938 by a WPA grant. Recent activities included the restoration of the 1938 Forney High School building. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 12 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 13 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 17 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 17 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• 1899 Automobile Trip — 0.3 mi
• William Madison McDonald — 0.3 mi
• Dixie Overland Highway (U. S. Highway 80) — 0.4 mi
• Forney — 0.4 mi