Site of Westbrook School and Church

The Handbook of Texas says the town took its name from John W. Westbrook, an early settler, and lies on a tributary of Morgan Creek, eight miles west of Colorado City on the line now run by the Missouri Pacific. Westbrook was platted in 1906 and grew rapidly; by 1909 it had about 600 people, gins, a bank, a school, a threshing plant and a post office. In 1947 it counted 400 people and eight businesses. The population fell to 298 by 1980, 237 in 1990 and 203 in 2000.

What the plaque says

These two pioneer institutions, which began even before the town grew up here, were first housed in the same tiny, one-room building. The structure was erected in 1890 by local settlers when Westbrook was only a flag-stop on the Texas & Pacific Line. Located on a four-acre plot, the single classroom had rough, wooden benches and, at the front, one long "recitation bench", where pupils sat to recite their lessons from memory in typical 19th Century style. The school "year" then lasted three to six months. On Sundays this was the site of services for the Westbrook Baptist Church, organized 1890 with nine charter members, by the Rev. J.C. Burkett, Pastor of the Colorado (City) Church. Although sermons were given only once a month, Sunday school was held each week. Parishioners, who often lived miles away, would cook and pack basket lunches Saturday and spend all day Sunday at the church. The building was a social center for the widely scattered settlers. In 1902, as population increased, a new church was erected north of the school yard; and in 1905 the town provided a modern, two-story school building. The old structure was sold to a farmer for use as a barn. Only the cemetery remains at the site today. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Colorado City State Park — 5.2 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 9.7 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• Scurry County Museum — 24 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• Hotel Settles — 27 mi
  Big Spring's fifteen-story hotel of 1930, built on ranch oil money, once the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, empty and roosted in by pigeons for decades and now restored.

More markers nearby

• Spade Community Cemetery — 7.5 mi
• Col-Tex Refinery — 9.0 mi
• The Founding of Colorado City — 9.4 mi
• Mitchell County — 9.4 mi