Lilia and Josephine Casis

Lilia Casis was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1869, to a lawyer father and a German mother related to the Kleberg family. She hoped to study medicine, but her father's death set her to tutoring at nineteen. Entering the University of Texas in 1894, she earned her bachelor's degree in one year by examination and her master's in Romance languages in 1896, holding the first student assistantship in modern languages. She was dean of women from 1919 to 1921. Casis Elementary opened as a joint project with the university, a demonstration school noted for its trilingual classes.

What the plaque says

Lilia and Josephine Casis Josephine (1873-1947) and Lilia (1869-1947) Casis were reared in Jamaica, where their European parents educated them in the classics, languages, and music, before they moved to Texas in 1890. Josephine earned a teaching degree and taught at Austin's Palm School for 33 years. Lilia pursued graduate studies in Europe and at the University of Texas, where in 1916 she became the first woman full professor. The Casis sisters left their estates to the University of Texas; in 1951 the Austin school district named Casis Elementary School in their honor. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mount Bonnell — 1.2 mi
  Austin's old lookout over the Colorado, named by an 1838 traveler, picnicked on by George and Libbie Custer, and reached by a 1939 flight of about 100 limestone steps.
• Harry Ransom Center — 2.0 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 2.3 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 2.5 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• William Steele — 0.5 mi
• Major John B. Jones — 0.5 mi
• Camp Mabry — 0.5 mi
• Texas in the Civil War - Adjutants General — 0.5 mi