Powell Point School

Mitchell was born in Columbus, Colorado County, on December 8, 1878, and his mother had moved to Fort Bend County by the mid-1880s. He went to elementary school in Kendleton, entered Wiley College's high school department in 1894 and earned his bachelor's degree there in May 1903, then taught a year in Simonton before opening Powell Point. The Rosenwald building was finished in 1925. The school kept grades one through twelve until 1954. The rural settlement nearby had taken the school's name in the 1890s, when the school was moved there from Kendleton.

What the plaque says

Powell Point School William E. Kendall, an Anglo lawyer from Richmond, Texas, subdivided his plantation here into 100-acre farm tracts in 1869. He sold the land exclusively to Freedmen and by the 1880s a distinctly African American community named Kendleton had developed here. In 1890 local A. M. E. churches built three one-room schools to form Common School District No. 4, an all-African American district which included the original land grant of Elizabeth Powell. Tellie B. Mitchell, a Kendleton native and graduate of Wiley College (1903), returned to Kendleton and established Powell Point School in 1904 in a two-room schoolhouse. The school prospered and in 1918 graduated six students, five of whom went on to college and became educators. In 1923 Mitchell persuaded the Rosenwald Foundation to grant funds to build a new Powell Point School facility here with six classrooms, a library, and an auditorium. The school became a model institution and entry into its student body was an advantage sought by African American throughout southeast Texas. T. B. Mitchell served as school principal until 1954. Powell Point, today an elementary school, is a locally revered institution which symbolizes Kendleton's unique cultural heritage and promise for the future. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazos Bend State Park — 26 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 32 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.

More markers nearby

• Kendleton — 2.5 mi
• Terry v. Adams — 2.6 mi
• Beasley — 6.3 mi
• Guardian Angel Catholic Church — 10 mi