Site of Primrose School

The homesteaders came because of a surveying gap. Most land in southern and western Hockley County had been granted to other counties as school land, but a narrow strip along the county's south line, missed by the first survey, was opened to homesteading in 1902. Jim Jarrott, a lawyer and surveyor, and twenty-six other families filed claims that year; Jarrott was killed that August in what is believed to have been cattlemen's hostility to the newcomers. Freighters hauled the settlers' goods from Big Spring for sixty or sixty-five cents per hundredweight. Primrose disappeared from highway maps in the 1930s.

What the plaque says

Site of Primrose School (About one-half mile southwest) First public school in Hockley County; named for a wild prairie flower. In 1902 homesteaders had begun farming here. By 1909 their children needed education, so the parents hauled lumber by wagon from Big Spring (about 100 mi. S), donated labor, and built a one-room schoolhouse. Classes began Dec. 13, 1909, with pupils from the Ardis, Baker, Blankenship, Brown, Carter, Cowan, Dixon, Perritt, Rose, and Witherspoon families. The schoolhouse served as polling place, church, and public meeting hall in 1917, when Ropesville was established about a mile away, with better facilities. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Ranching Heritage Center — 21 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 22 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• Buddy Holly Center — 22 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 23 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.

More markers nearby

• Ropesville Resettlement Project — 1.1 mi
• Meadow United Methodist Church — 4.8 mi
• Brooks Blacksmith Shop — 4.9 mi
• Route of Nolan Expedition — 8.0 mi