Nolanville School

Nolanville takes its name from Nolan Creek, which the Handbook says honors the explorer and filibuster Philip Nolan. It began as Nolan Valley, and a post office called Noland Valley opened in 1878. The railroad arrived in the early 1880s and the town became Nolanville in 1883, a name Belton had carried before its own change in 1851. In 1884 it had about a hundred people, two mill-gins, three churches and a school, and a weekly paper, the Item, existed by 1896. Growth around Killeen and Fort Hood pushed the population past 700 by 1968.

What the plaque says

Nolanville School Pioneers who settled this area in the early 1850s built a 1-room log schoolhouse about 1854. That year Bell County was divided into 15 school districts. Nolanville School moved to several different sites in the area. In 1928-29 the last high school class graduated from a 2-story brick schoolhouse in Nolanville. At various times after 1929 the school offered classes in nine or eight grades. At the time of its merger with Killeen's Independent School District in 1972 Nolanville was a six-grade elementary school. A new Nolanville school was built at this site in 1986. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 16 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Mother Neff State Park — 20 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

• John Blackburn Log House — 6.0 mi
• First Baptist Church of Killeen — 6.0 mi
• City of Killeen — 6.4 mi
• Santa Fe Depot — 7.2 mi