Site of Rusk College

Rusk's Baptist school was chartered on July 18, 1895, and opened on September 2 in a three-story brick building with seven teachers, 142 pupils and a $9,000 debt. In 1898 the Cherokee Baptist Association and the school's board of trustees fell out over the board's move to organize independently. In 1899, with the dispute unresolved, the Eastern Texas Educational Society organized Jacksonville College. Enrollment never topped 300 from 1915 to 1928. Rusk did not raise the $25,000 the Baptist General Convention asked in 1927, and in April 1928 the president announced the school would close.

What the plaque says

Site of Rusk College After efforts to relocate a Methodist school to Rusk fell through, the community convinced the Cherokee Baptist Association to establish a school on 12.2 acres donated by local resident Georgiana Bonner. Chartered in 1894, the East Texas Baptist Institute was housed in a grand 3-story structure and offered classes from first grade through junior college. Renamed Rusk Academy of Industrial Arts in 1907 and Rusk College in 1919, the six-building campus was closed in 1928. In 1937 the main building was razed and its cornerstone later put on display at the First Baptist Church. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Caddo Mounds State Historic Site — 13 mi
  Three earthen mounds of an ancestral Caddo village and ceremonial center on the old El Camino Real, settled about A.D. 800 and still sacred to Caddo people, with a grass house and visitor center.
• Texas State Railroad Excursion Train — 25 mi
  A round trip of about 25 miles of track between the Palestine and Rusk depots through the Piney Woods, on a line built by prison labor and reopened as a tourist railroad in 1976.

More markers nearby

• Site of Sam Houston Speeches — 0.5 mi
• Rusk Footbridge — 0.5 mi
• Cherokee County — 0.5 mi
• Cherokee County C.S.A. — 0.5 mi