Marion Public Schools

Before the townsite was laid out, the ground here was a camp for railroad workers, on land from Joshua W. Young's plantation, which the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio crossed in 1877. German families soon moved in from a settlement on Santa Clara Creek, and by the mid-1880s Marion had steam, grist and saw mills, two cotton gins, four general stores, a church, a district school and 250 residents. The town was incorporated by 1941, when it had 373 residents and twenty businesses. Its population was 984 in 1990 and 1,099 in 2000.

What the plaque says

Marion Public Schools The town of Marion, a German settlement, was founded in 1877 as a marketing and shipping point for the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad. T. W. Peirce donated $3,000 and land for free public schools in Marion. In 1878 the first schoolhouse was built. In 1917 a brick building facing Cunningham Street replaced the first school. In 1938 a third building was constructed by the Works Progress Administration. As student enrollment increased, the grades were split into three schools. The community continues the tradition of strong support of its district schools. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 9.0 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 — 12 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.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 15 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.
• The Alamo — 23 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.

More markers nearby

• Founding of Town of Marion, 1877 — steps away
• St. Paul Church — 5.2 mi
• Schertz — 7.8 mi
• Carl Heinrich Guenther — 8.1 mi