Wheeler School

Students moved into the red brick building on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1914. Its eight classrooms were said to be sufficient for fifty years. Even after the district sent grades seven to twelve to a high school on Abrams Road in 1952, graduations stayed in the old auditorium. Central Expressway's arrival brought so many pupils that one second-grade class doubled to about forty-six by midyear. When alumni gathered for the building's centennial in 2014, the Dallas Morning News quoted district historian Frances Hough on the original plan.

What the plaque says

Wheeler School Kentuckian William J. (Uncle Billy) Wheeler came to this part of Texas soon after the end of the Civil War. In 1870 he deeded land to the Houston and Texas Central Railway for the townsite that became the city of Richardson and for the railroad right-of-way. In 1880 Wheeler provided a public school just northwest of this site for Richardson area children. After the Wheeler Schoolhouse burned in 1900, classes moved into a new, two-story, four-room, structure on this site. By this time the Richardson Independent School District had been created. In 1914 the frame schoolhouse was replaced with a two-story, red brick structure. The eight-room schoolhouse was staffed by five teachers. In 1927 two wings were added to house the increased enrollment brought about by the consolidation of the Richardson and Addison High schools. Further consolidation of surrounding common school districts in the 1930s and a population boom in the 1950s expanded school enrollment and created the need for other facilities. The red brick schoolhouse served only elementary grades from 1952 until 1960, when it began to serve as the district administration building. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 11 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 12 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 12 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 12 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church of Richardson — 0.5 mi
• First United Methodist Church Richardson — 0.7 mi
• Richardson — 1.0 mi
• First Baptist Church of Richardson — 1.2 mi