Rosenwald School

Rosenwald grants came with conditions. A school had to hold classes for more than five months a year, the site had to be deeded to public authorities, and the Black community had to raise matching money in cash, materials or labor; grants ran from $500 to $2,100, depending on the number of teachers. In Texas, Black residents gave almost $400,000 over twelve years. The fund built 527 buildings in fifty-two Texas counties, and about thirty survived as of 2005, among them Lockhart Vocational/Carver High School, one of four listed on the National Register.

What the plaque says

Rosenwald School Julius Rosenwald created the Rosenwald fund in 1917 to endow new African American schools. Luling's Rosenwald school opened in 1925 to replace the Luling Colored School which began operation in 1874. The Rosenwald School employed four teachers for ten grades and was built on 2.5 acres including a shop, library, home economics and vocational departments. P. W. Tucker was the first principal. The school added buildings to the campus and maintained high scholastic and extracurricular standards until it closed in 1966. Though most original buildings have been razed, the site continues to be a school campus of the Luling Independent School District. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 14 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 22 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 27 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• City of Luling — 0.5 mi
• Edgar B. Davis, Oil Pioneer-Philanthropist — 0.5 mi
• Episcopal Church of the Annunciation — 0.6 mi
• Zedler's Mills — 1.4 mi