One Half Mile North to the Site Once Occupied by Trinity University

Before Trinity there was Tehuacana Academy. The Handbook of Texas says Franklin L. Yoakum and Daniel G. Molloy taught there in 1852, in a school the community organized and supported itself, with no required Bible courses and no denominational teaching. It operated at least ten years and died in the Civil War, yet it gave Cumberland Presbyterians a reason to put a university here. Their earlier colleges, Ewing of 1848, Chapel Hill of 1849 and Larissa of 1855, had also failed in the war, and planning for a single school began in 1866.

What the plaque says

One Half Mile North to the Site Once Occupied by Trinity University Established by the Brazos Synod of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Opened its doors as a co-educational institution September 23, 1869. Chartered August 13, 1870. Included schools of law and theology. Removed in 1902 to Waxahachie.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 6.5 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 7.3 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 12 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 25 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.

More markers nearby

• Tehuacana — 0.4 mi
• Robert M. Love — 1.1 mi
• Joseph W. Stubenrauch — 2.6 mi
• Alfonso Steel — 5.0 mi