Juan Seguin School

The school it merged with in 1971 carried the name of Lizzie Margaret Burges, by family accounts the daughter of a formerly enslaved man, who bought a 101-acre farm near Seguin. She studied at the Abraham Lincoln School, took a bachelor's degree at Guadalupe College in 1904 and taught at her old school, later Ball High, for forty-four years, until her health failed in 1947. The Lizzie M. Burges School, dedicated on November 14, 1954, before more than 500 people, served Black kindergarten and elementary pupils until Seguin's schools fully integrated in 1966. It closed in 1999.

What the plaque says

Juan Seguin School Guadalupe County was home to a number of rural schools for the area's burgeoning population of students of Mexican descent. In addition to those already living here, immigrants came from Mexico in the early 20th century, fleeing for safety during that country's revolution. In 1902, the local school board, under the leadership of the city of Seguin, passed a motion to establish a separate school for Mexican children. Juan Seguin School, opened in 1903, was an early model of a segregated urban school for children of Mexican heritage. Students first met in a home owned by William Greifenstein, whom the Seguin City Council paid monthly for the house's use. In 1906, William Blumberg arranged with the city council to build a school house on North Pecan Street (later East Cedar Street). By 1915, the city began to make efforts to secure a permanent site for the school. In 1916, an independent school district was established and along with this effort, a bond for raising money to purchase a site for the Mexican school was put to vote. Though defeated, a bond the next year was successful, and in 1918, Mexican Public School Ward #2, as it was then known, was built on the corner of Dolle and Medlin Streets. Grades one through six attended the school. More classrooms were added to the original one-room structure, and by 1948, the school had several rooms, an office, and an auditorium. Juan Seguin School merged with Lizzie M. Burges School in 1971, before the campus became one school again in 1975. Juan Seguin Elementary School closed in 2010. However, its impact remains felt through the generations of students that attended and its success as an institution where Hispanic students received an education. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 13 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 14 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 22 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 24 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.

More markers nearby

• Black Education in Seguin — steps away
• Colonel Nathaniel Benton — 0.5 mi
• Second Baptist Church of Seguin — 0.5 mi
• Juan Seguin — 0.6 mi