O'Henry School Building

While this school served Llano's south side, the town also had a private military school. The Texas Military Institute, successor to a school of that name that had closed in Austin in 1879, opened in Llano on September 14, 1897, under the Rev. Charles P. Dorset, with seven instructors and a four-year course. It was housed in the three-story brick and red granite Algona Hotel until a tornado damaged the building in 1900, and it had a gymnasium and an armory on an eighteen-acre campus. Tuition and fees came to $250 for thirty-six weeks, and chapel was required.

What the plaque says

O'Henry School Building The original section of this two-story schoolhouse was completed in 1887 to serve the Llano students living south of the river. Constructed of native sandstone and timber, it was known as the "College Building" because of the stately style. An addition to the north of the schoolhouse, built of locally-quarried granite, was completed in 1902. The school name was chosen to honor the noted Texas writer William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). The O'Henry School building housed all grades until 1925, when a separate high school structure was built. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Llano County Courthouse Square — 0.5 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 — 17 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 — 18 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.
• Enchanted Rock State Natural Area — 19 mi
  A dome of pink granite north of Fredericksburg that rises some 385 feet above Sandy Creek, creaks as it cools at night, and has drawn people for thousands of years.

More markers nearby

• St. James Lutheran Church — steps away
• Dillard Cooper — 0.2 mi
• First Christian Church of Llano — 0.3 mi
• Richmond Alexander McInnis — 0.4 mi