Site of Valley View School

Valley View itself dates from 1889 and was known through the 1890s for good crops. A new elementary school built in 1927 was meant for 300 pupils, and by 1931 the independent district, with 555 students and thirteen teachers, was the largest in Texas in a community without a post office, according to the Handbook of Texas. After the 1970 consolidation only grades one through six stayed in Valley View; by 1979 only the fifth and sixth grades remained, and the school closed for good after the 1980 term. The community still counted 200 residents in 2000.

What the plaque says

Area families established the Denny and Jones Dale schools in 1897. In 1918, the schools combined, and J.A. Kemp and R.S. Allen sold land to the trustees of Wichita County School District No. 6 at this site to build the Valley View School. The next year, oil discovered in the Kemp-Munger-Allen (KMA) field brought many new residents. In 1924, the completion of lakes Kemp and Diversion, and the creation of a farm irrigation district, influenced even more growth. Two years later, with 325 students in grades one through eleven, the school opened a larger building, and voters created the Valley View Independent School District in 1928. Local African American students attended school at the Wichita County Rural Colored School, which operated on the Munger farm from 1925 to 1942. In the 1930s, the Valley View School student population increased, peaking in the 1937-38 school year with nearly 600 students. The district added new buildings as needed, including a second brick structure completed as a federal project in 1942. In the 1950s, however, with the mechanization of farming and a decline in the oil industry, the area's population began decreasing. The Eagle Bend School merged into the Valley View district in 1956, and although it completed new facilities in 1968, the district consolidated with Iowa Park in 1970. The Iowa Park Consolidated Independent School District utilized former Valley View facilities for several years, but most have since been dismantled. The significance of the Valley View School continues, though, in the lives of those who were students here over the years. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kell House Museum — 15 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 16 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Royal Theater — 21 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 23 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.

More markers nearby

• Van Dorn Trail — 0.2 mi
• KMA Oilfield — 3.1 mi
• Maggie and Herod "Pap" Simpson — 5.7 mi
• First Methodist Church of Holliday — 5.9 mi