Murrell School

Murrell School began its year late because of cotton, and cotton explains much of the county around it. The Handbook of Texas says that for the first third of the twentieth century roughly 30 to 50 percent of Coryell County's improved acreage was in cotton, and the record crop of nearly 58,000 bales came in 1906. Tenant farming and sharecropping peaked at 58 percent of farms in 1930. Planting then fell from 109,000 acres in 1930 to 50,500 in 1940, and by the late 1950s cotton grew on fewer than 17,000 acres.

What the plaque says

Murrell School MURRELL SCHOOL MANY OF THIS AREA'S EARLY SETTLERS CAME FROM SARDIS, MISSISSIPPI, ESTABLISHING A COMMUNITY NAMED FOR POSTMASTER JOE ATER. LEMUEL MURRELL, ANOTHER EARLY RESIDENT, BUILT A LOG SCHOOLHOUSE IN THE LATE 1870s. ALABAMA NATIVE ROBERT EARL TIMMONS WAS THE FIRST TEACHER. IN THE LATE 1800s, MURRELL SCHOOL HAD NEARLY 100 STUDENTS IN ITS ATTENDANCE AREA. A NEW MURRELL SCHOOLHOUSE WAS BUILT IN 1909-10, WITH A THIRD ROOM ADDED TO THE FRAME BUILDING IN 1920. THE SCHOOL YEAR OFTEN STARTED IN MID-OCTOBER, AFTER STUDENTS HELPED THEIR FAMILIES HARVEST LOCAL COTTON CROPS. MURRELL SCHOOL CONSOLIDATED WITH JONESBORO SCHOOL IN 1948. TODAY, THE MURRELL SCHOOLHOUSE IS ONE OF FEW STANDING RURAL SCHOOLS IN CORYELL COUNTY. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hamilton County Courthouse — 20 mi
  A limestone courthouse of 1886-87 on the Hamilton square, built after the county's 1878 courthouse burned, enlarged in the early 1930s and rededicated in 2012 after restoration.
• Bosque Museum — 24 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Mother Neff State Park — 27 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Jonesboro Methodist Church — 6.5 mi
• Purmela Baptist Church — 6.6 mi
• Lincolnville Community — 7.0 mi
• Site of the Ireland School — 7.1 mi