Happy Public Schools

The schools grew with a farm town. The First State Bank of Happy was chartered in 1908, and telephone service, first switched from the Currie farm, moved to an exchange in town. The first brick building, Mose Wesley's auto repair shop, went up in 1913. Happy incorporated in August 1925 with P. J. Neff as mayor and Tom Bandy and William F. Miller as commissioners, and it organized a volunteer fire department during the 1920s. By 1940 it had 576 residents, and two grain elevators made up the skyline. Part of the town lies in Randall County.

What the plaque says

Happy Public Schools Formal education began for students of Happy, Texas when the original settlement, two miles east, moved to this townsite in 1906 in response to the newly laid Santa Fe Rail Line. Sarah Ann Rose taught local students in a one-room frame schoolhouse during the 1906-07 school year, and early school trustees were J.F. White, W.H. Foster and S.T. Whitman. Continuing to grow, the school district built new schoohouses, including a two-story brick building constructed in 1916-17. When a second one was built in 1928-29, the earlier structure became the campus for younger students, and grades eight through eleven occupied the new school. The expanded campus benefited the district when the rural schools of Salem, Union Hill, Sunnyhill, Childress, Sunnyslope, Arney, Garrison and Wayside consolidated into the Happy district in the mid-1930s. A fire destroyed the 1928 building in 1986. One year later, the community constructed a single-story building on the same site. The Happy school system offers many opportunities for students. Athletic programs began in the 1920s with football and basketball. One Happy alumnus led the U.S. Men's Basketball Team to victory in the 1936 Olympics. The Happy Band, organized in 1933 and later called the Uncle Sam Band, has received many honors and played for dignitaries including President Franklin D. and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. The band also performed at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.Students are rewarded for excellence in academics, leadership and participation in events through the schools' achievement award program, initiated in 1956. Once called the Jackrabbits and the Happy Jacks, the Happy Cowboys and Cowgirls benefit from efforts of local educators and families who work to prepare children and youth for their futures. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 16 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 17 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.
• Lighthouse Trail — 18 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.

More markers nearby

• Site of Old Happy — 0.5 mi
• Happy Cemetery — 0.8 mi
• C. Stuart Johnston — 14 mi
• Arney School — 14 mi