Viola Case

The school came first and the library grew out of it. The Victoria Female Academy, founded in 1848 by the Presbyterian minister John R. Shive and his wife Viola, taught botany, astronomy, calculus, Latin, piano and guitar. When the city leased it a building in 1858, an ordinance required the teachers to repair it at their own cost and whitewash the fence and building once a year. Mrs. Case reopened the school after the Civil War, admitted boys about 1869, and in 1870 moved it to her own property, after which it was called Mrs. Case's Select School.

What the plaque says

Viola Case Born in Virginia in 1821, Viola Case moved in 1848 to Victoria, where she taught at the Victoria Female Academy founded by her husband, the Rev. John R. Shive. She continued the school after his death in 1853 and after the death of her second husband, the Rev. Joel T. Case, in 1868. By 1870 the academy known as Mrs. Case's Select School, was coeducational and widely respected. She remained in charge until her death in 1894. Until 1973 the Victoria Bronte Public Library, which began as a collection of Mrs. Case's books, was supported by the Bronte Club, a literary society she founded in 1873. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — steps away
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 1.6 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 25 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Hauschild Opera House — steps away
• First English Evangelical Lutheran Church — steps away
• First United Methodist Church of Victoria — steps away
• Mitchell School — steps away