St. Thomas High School

St. Thomas has run under the Basilian Fathers since its founding, and it kept the name St. Thomas College at its Hadley and Austin streets building from 1906 to 1940. A memorandum of December 11, 1928, records the Basilians' agreement with the Diocese of Galveston to move it west to Memorial Drive. By 1985 it had about 7,000 graduates, among them two bishops, more than 100 priests, a congressman, a director of the FBI, a Medal of Honor recipient and a Pulitzer Prize winner. The St. Thomas Foundation, chartered in 1969, ran its first fund drive in 1973.

What the plaque says

St. Thomas High School Established 1900 as St. Thomas College, and housed that year in a former Franciscan monastery built in 1861 at Franklin Avenue and Caroline Street. The founders were the Rev. Nicholas Roche, C. S. B., and two other Basilian fathers. (Their order originated in France in 1822 and expanded into Canada in 1850; the Basilians in Houston were the first in Texas.) When original school suffered hurricane damage, the fathers relocated at Capitol and Main. In 1903 permanency was assured when Father Roche bought a block of land at Austin and Hadley and constructed Houston's first college preparatory school for boys. Thanks to the foresight of a native Texan, the Rev. T. P. O'Rourke, C. S. B., educator and author, St. Thomas High School in 1940 moved to this site on the bank of Buffalo Bayou. Father A. L. Higgins directed the building of the new plant, which has expanded in later years. During Houston's 20th century growth into a focus of world culture, St. Thomas High School has trained men of vision and responsibility, winners of national and international fame: statesmen, churchmen, artists, historians, athletes, civic and business leaders, industrial pioneers, and citizens of many talents. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 1.8 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.8 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 2.2 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.5 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Bend — 0.8 mi
• Brown Chapel A. M. E. Church — 1.0 mi
• Camp Logan — 1.3 mi
• Edwin Fairfax Gray — 1.3 mi