George Washington Carver High School

The championships the plaque counts were won in a separate league. Black high schools were kept out of the University Interscholastic League, so in 1920 the Colored Teachers State Association and the state's Negro School Division formed a league of their own, and Prairie View took it over in 1923. It grew from 40 schools to 300 by 1927 and about 500 at its peak, running contests in football, basketball, track, typing, declamation and music. The UIL opened its membership to all public schools in June 1965, and the Prairie View league disbanded after the 1969-70 school year.

What the plaque says

George Washington Carver High School The first public school for African American children of this area was Goose Creek School for Coloreds. Founded in 1921 as a grade school, it served the children of the Baytown area, as well as those in La Porte, Cedar Bayou, and McNair. Classes were also held in Mt. Rose Baptist Church. The school's first principal, Anna B. Edwards, was paid $90 per month. A frame school building constructed at the northwest corner of Carver St. and Oak St. (now Martin Luther King Dr.) Opened in the fall of 1924; a brick addition in 1927 expanded it to the ninth grade. The school's name was changed to honor scientist, educator, inventor and botanist George Washington Carver by June 1940, and it was accredited as a four-year high school in 1941. In 1948, a larger, modern campus was opened four blocks east at Carver St. and Lee Dr., and the old building became an elementary school. Carver High was consistently ranked as one of the top segregated schools in the state, and students excelled in both academics and athletics. Carver won nine state band competitions and eight state sports championships in the Prairie View Interscholastic League. There were just five principals in 46 years: Ernest A. Archia, William M. Davis, Clyde J. Messiah, Edward F. Green and George Perkins. The high school closed after the 1966-1967 school year as a result of desegregation. Carver Elementary School was then located here from 1967 until 1995, when a former oil storage pit was discovered on the property. The buildings were demolished in 2002 and a new Carver Elementary was dedicated at a nearby site. Carver School, which originally laid the educational foundation for area black children, continues to educate the Baytown community. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 6.3 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Space Center Houston — 14 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Emancipation Park — 23 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 24 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.

More markers nearby

• Lee College — 0.5 mi
• City of Baytown — 0.7 mi
• The Baytown Sun — 1.2 mi
• Bayland Guards — 1.3 mi