I. M. Terrell High School

The school is remembered as much for its band room as its classrooms. Wikipedia's history credits music teacher G. A. Baxter with training a run of jazz and rhythm and blues players, among them Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, John Carter and King Curtis. One account says Coleman was dismissed from the band for improvising. Terrell also drew Black students from Arlington, Bedford, Benbrook, Burleson, Roanoke and Weatherford, towns where they could not attend school. It competed in the Prairie View Interscholastic League and closed in the early 1970s as Fort Worth integrated its schools.

What the plaque says

I. M. Terrell High School In 1882, the Fort Worth school system opened its first free public school for black students, called "East Ninth Street Colored School." It was moved to the corner of East Twelfth Street and Steadman in a property trade with the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad in 1906, and renamed "North Side Colored School No. 11." Isaiah Milligan Terrell was named principal and served until 1915. A 1909 bond election provided funds for a new building, which opened in May 1910. In honor of its former principal, the school was named "I.M. Terrell High School" in 1921. The school at twelfth and Steadman became a Junior High and Elementary in 1938, when Terrell High School was moved to its present location at 1411 E. 18th Street, site of a former white elementary school. Isaiah Milligan Terrell was born in Grimes County in 1859. Named one of the first four black teachers in Fort Worth in 1882, he served as principal and supervisor of black schools. He was married in 1883 to Marcelite Landry, a respected music teacher. Terrell became President of Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University) in 1915, and later became an active leader in Houston's black community. He died in 1931. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 1.2 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 3.0 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 3.2 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 3.3 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.

More markers nearby

• Texas Spring Palace — 0.7 mi
• Hell's Half Acre — 0.8 mi
• St. Andrews United Methodist Church of Fort Worth — 0.8 mi
• Winfield Garage — 0.8 mi