San Jacinto High School

Houston Junior College grew out of school superintendent Edison E. Oberholtzer's plan of 1926 and was authorized on March 7, 1927, with 230 students and twenty-five faculty members. A 1938 gift of 108 acres from Julius Settegast and Ben Taub and a donation from Hugh Roy Cullen and his wife gave the university its own campus, which opened in 1939. It left the Houston school board's control as a private institution in 1945, started KUHT, the nation's first educational television station, in 1953, and joined the state system in 1963.

What the plaque says

San Jacinto High School South End Junior High School opened its doors in 1914 with 750 students in an impressive classical revival style structure built here in 1913. South End Junior High became a senior high school in 1923, and in 1926 its name was changed to San Jacinto High School. Houston Junior College, predecessor to the University of Huston, began offering night classes at San Jacinto High School in 1927. An east wing containing 20 classrooms, a boys' gymnasium, and lunch room was built in 1929. In 1936 an art deco style west wing containing an 1800-seat auditorium, classrooms, and a girls' gymnasium was built. The University of Houston, which officially opened here in 1934, continued to offer night classes at San Jacinto High School until 1939. Special Education students began attending classes here in 1947. In 1960 two large technical/vocational school facilities were added to the San Jacinto High School complex. San Jacinto High School held its final classes here in 1970 when the Houston Technical Institute occupied the building. Houston Community College began offering classes here in 1971. Many of San Jacinto High School's former students formed an alumni association which by the mid-1990s had a membership in excess of 9,000. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — steps away
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Emancipation Park — 0.7 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 1.2 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.2 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• The Houston Light Guard — steps away
• Courtlandt Place — 0.5 mi
• Dr. Benjamin Jesse Covington and the Covington House — 1.0 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Houston — 1.0 mi