Old Moulton

Moulton Male and Female Institute taught everything from English primers to Virgil, Cicero, calculus, surveying and astronomy, and every subject was required to graduate. Melvin Allis, a Rochester graduate who had served in Hood's Texas Brigade, opened it in the fall of 1874. Fire destroyed the first buildings in 1876; a two-story classroom building and a music hall replaced them for 1877. By 1890 the school had 160 students, thirty of them boarders. Board, room and tuition came to $14 a month. Thankful Allis ran it for three years after her husband died in 1892.

What the plaque says

Old Moulton At this point was center of original town of Moulton (named, according to tradition, by a man from Moulton, Alabama). First postmaster was James Walker (1856). Town gained statewide fame for the Moulton Institute operated 1874-1895 by Melvin H. Allis, M. A., and wife, Thankful ("Aunt Thank"). On the faculty was an outstanding teacher of music, Miss Sallie McLean. In 1887, San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad built its line two miles to the east, so town gradually moved there. Old Moulton Cemetery is one mile to the southeast. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 8.7 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 11 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 17 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 17 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.

More markers nearby

• Adolph Hofner — 2.1 mi
• Moulton — 2.1 mi
• St. Paul's African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church — 2.6 mi
• Moulton's World War II Observation Tower — 3.3 mi