Lone Grove School

In 1910, the year this schoolhouse was built, a scholastic census counted 625,917 Texas children in country school districts, many in one-room schools where one teacher taught several grades. Another 342,552 attended independent districts in some 670 communities. A state property tax for schools, twenty cents from 1883, rose to thirty-five cents in 1918, when Texas began supplying textbooks. In 1920 voters passed the Better Schools Amendment, letting districts raise more local tax for education, though some counties were slow to use it. Sparsely settled counties added to the system's lack of uniformity.

What the plaque says

Lone Grove School Among the rural schools in early Llano County were Lone Grove, Flat Rock, Little Llano, McNutt and Spice Wood. These rural schools also served their communities as gathering places. Located on a major route between Llano and Burnet, Lone Grove grew, and when officials divided the county into districts in 1884, it became district number two. This schoolhouse dates to 1910, on a site donated by D.P. Speck and J.L. Templeton. In 1937, Lone Grove became one of two rural schools in the county to offer high school courses. Building additions served the growing population until consolidation with Llano schools in 1947. The building is now used as a gathering and polling place. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Llano County Courthouse Square — 7.6 mi
  The 1893 Romanesque courthouse on Llano's square, built after a fire at the height of a boom that was meant to make the granite town an iron city.
• Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery — 13 mi
  A free federal hatchery below Inks Dam on the Colorado, with thirty production ponds that draw birds and a look at how fish are raised from egg to harvest.
• Inks Lake State Park — 13 mi
  A state park on a constant-level lake of the Colorado, between Buchanan and Inks dams, with pink granite and gneiss at the water and CCC work along Park Road 4.
• Longhorn Cavern State Park — 16 mi
  A cave carved by an underground river in the Hill Country, cleared of mud by hand in the 1930s and reached down 52 stone steps on a guided tour.

More markers nearby

• Board Branch Cemetery — 0.7 mi
• Isaac Byler Maxwell — 2.4 mi
• Llano County — 5.5 mi
• Baby Head Cemetery — 7.0 mi