Gober Public Schools

Gober was Grittersville first, the Handbook of Texas says, supposedly for a steam gristmill. In 1885 residents renamed it for J. F. and William Gober, who built that first mill, a detail the plaque softens to early settlers. A school history by Dr. Mack Broiles recalls a minister, R. P. Henderson, who farmed during the week and held a summer church for all denominations that gave many children and adults their introduction to reading. The Carpenter family, there since 1847, gave land for both the school and the cemetery.

What the plaque says

Gober Public Schools The town known as Gober was settled in the 1840s, and was first called Grittersville. A town site was platted in 1885 and the town was renamed to honor early settlers. Public education in Gober began in a one-room schoolhouse that also served as a church and social center. In 1924 fire destroyed the school, but it was replaced by a two-story frame structure. A new brick school was erected in 1938-39, and the Gober Independent school District was formed. The school closed in 1969 due to declining enrollment.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 9.9 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 24 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 26 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 32 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.

More markers nearby

• Gober Baptist Church — steps away
• Gober Garage — 0.2 mi
• Portland — 3.6 mi
• Site of Bartley-Woods School — 3.8 mi