Site of Bastrop Military Institute

The school opened in 1851, the Handbook of Texas says, in a two-story pine building that cost $15,000. It had separate study halls for boys and girls and a library of 1,000 volumes. The first session enrolled 132 students, and by 1857 there were 194. William Hancock was the first principal, followed by John Carmer. Joseph D. Sayers, later governor, studied here from 1852 to 1860. On May 25, 1872, the academy's property passed into the Bastrop public school system.

What the plaque says

Site of Bastrop Military Institute A Methodist institution chartered January 24, 1852 as Bastrop Academy. Rechartered under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1853. In 1856 became the Bastrop Military Institute.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 2.1 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 20 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 24 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 26 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.

More markers nearby

• Bastrop Methodist Church — steps away
• First National Bank of Bastrop — 0.2 mi
• Baron de Bastrop Monument — 0.4 mi
• Home Town of Texas Confederate Major Joseph D. Sayers — 0.4 mi