Site of the Ireland School

Before it was Ireland the place was called Hamco, because it lay on the Hamilton-Coryell county line. The Handbook of Texas says that in 1911, when the Stephenville North and South Texas Railway reached it, residents applied for a post office named for Gov. John Ireland. The town peaked in the 1920s with three general stores, three churches, a bank and about 400 people. When the railroad was abandoned in the early 1940s the community declined rapidly, and by the late 1940s only forty residents remained. By 1970 its post office was a rural branch of Gatesville's.

What the plaque says

Site of the Ireland School School classes were first conducted in a church tabernacle when Ireland was founded in 1911. The town was platted on the Coryell-Hamilton County line and named for Texas Governor John Ireland (1827-1896). A wooden frame school was erected in 1914, and in 1921 five acres were purchased at this site for a new two-story brick school building. Peak enrollment occurred in 1940 when thirty students graduated. All grades were taught here until 1943 when high school classes moved to the Jonesboro and Evant Schools. This school closed in 1964, and the building was demolished in 1984. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hamilton County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A limestone courthouse of 1886-87 on the Hamilton square, built after the county's 1878 courthouse burned, enlarged in the early 1930s and rededicated in 2012 after restoration.
• Bosque Museum — 27 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Meridian State Park — 27 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.

More markers nearby

• Purmela Baptist Church — 6.2 mi
• Jonesboro Methodist Church — 6.2 mi
• Murrell School — 7.1 mi
• Pearl Methodist Church — 12 mi