Site of Evergreen School

Henkhaus is the name on the railroad, not on the school. When the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway finished its Moulton to Shiner line in 1887, John Henkhaus built a store and cotton gin beside it, on land first certificated to Henry Russell. A post office ran in the store from 1898 to 1907. German immigrants had by then broken the old cattle range into small farms, and cotton prices set the village's fortunes. By 1950 two businesses served about fifty people, and school consolidation sent the children to Moulton.

What the plaque says

Site of Evergreen School School trustees Ernest Meyer, W. M. Krause and Otto Henkhaus purchased two acres here from August and Anna Seifert in 1897. The two-room frame Evergreen schoolhouse was built at this site and in 1903 an additional two acres were added to the property. Evergreen School served the Henkhaus community and the surrounding area. It maintained a windmill powered water well and was heated with a wood burning stove. A principal and an assistant teacher lived in a teacherage adjacent to the school and taught grades 1-4 in one room and grades 5-8 in the other. The school averaged 60 students for its seven-month school term. In 1939 an eight-month school term was instituted and the eight grade held its first graduation exercise. The ninth grade was added in the 1940-41 school year. Funds to install electric lights at the school in 1940-41 were raised through community sponsored activities such as plays, dances, and volleyball and softball tournaments. Overcrowded conditions at Evergreen School resulted in many of its students transferring to schools in the nearby communities of Moulton and Shiner during the 1940s. Evergreen School closed in the fall of 1951 and eventually the schoolhouse was razed. 1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 4.9 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 13 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 17 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.

More markers nearby

• Ponton Family — 0.8 mi
• St. Paul's African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church — 4.5 mi
• Moulton's World War II Observation Tower — 4.6 mi
• Kaspar Wire Works — 4.7 mi