Wayland School

Wayland began as a stagecoach way station, named, the Handbook of Texas says, for being on the way to more important towns. Its post office opened in 1877. The community counted thirty people in 1885 and 100 in 1890. Its choice in 1920 as an oil supply shipping point on the Eastland, Wichita Falls and Gulf Railroad lifted the population to 250 by 1930. It fell to seventy-five by 1940, and the post office closed in 1945. As late as 1974 the schoolhouse hosted country music sessions on the third Saturday of every month.

What the plaque says

The Wayland Free School District was formed about 1883 when land was donated by a local fraternal organization for school and cemetery purposes. Early frame structures were replaced by a new brick and stucco structure in 1920. The new four-room Wayland School building became a focal point in the community, which thrived throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. The promise of work in larger cities during World War II drew many people away from the area. The school closed during the 1941-1942 academic year, and the remaining students transferred to the Breckenridge Independent School District. The former Wayland School building was converted for use as a community center. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 14 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 17 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 32 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.

More markers nearby

• Parks Camp — 4.8 mi
• Gunsight Community — 5.3 mi
• Mount Zion Cemetery — 7.2 mi
• Walter Prescott Webb's Formative Years — 11 mi