Wooster Common School No. 38

The schoolhouse was the founder's work, and the Handbook and family records say more about him. Quincy Adams Wooster was born in Walden, Vermont, in 1839, son of the Reverend John Wooster, and farmed at Mapleton, Iowa, where nine of his ten children were born. He first saw Scott Bay in 1891 as a correspondent for the Monona County Democrat. Mail came through Lynchburg until Wooster's own post office opened in May 1894; it closed in 1914. The community cemetery's first burial was his youngest son, Martin Elmer, in 1894.

What the plaque says

Wooster Common School No. 38 In 1891, Quincy Adams Wooster visited Texas from Iowa. He was so impressed with this area that he sold his farm and moved his family here. With his business partner, Willard D. Crow, Wooster bought thousands of acres along Scott's Bay. He had the town of Wooster surveyed and platted on January 20, 1893. During World War II, the population increased greatly due to the nearby Humble Oil & Refining Company and the Humble Docks. In the 1950s, the City of Baytown annexed Wooster, then still a rural community. Hurricanes Carla (1961) and Alicia (1983), extensive subsidence, and industrial-use property acquisitions have removed most historic resources from Wooster. The Wooster Schoolhouse was built in 1894 on First Street near Market Street Road (later Arbor Street and Bayway Drive) on land donated by Junius Brown. It was designed by Q. A. Wooster and built by Wooster, Brown, and their sons and sons-in-law. Cypress was chosen for the frame and exterior siding and longleaf heart pine for the interior. On April 9, 1895, Harris County Commissioners Court was petitioned to create School District No. 38, to include Scott's Bay and Lynchburg. Q. A. Wooster, Junius Brown, and John Wesley Crow were elected the first trustees. Serving seven grades, the school became part of the Goose Creek school district in 1919. The schoolhouse closed and reopened several times, and was moved in 1937 to the new David G. Burnet Elementary School and used as a classroom, cafeteria, and music room. The building was also used for Sunday School lessons and as a voting place. It closed as a school facility for the last time in 1980 and was moved in 1986 to Republic of Texas Plaza for use as a museum. As the oldest known existing one-room frame schoolhouse in Harris County, it continues to have educational and historical value to the community. (1990, 2012)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 7.3 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Space Center Houston — 18 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Emancipation Park — 24 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Near Home Site of John Peter Sjolander — 2.2 mi
• Humble Oil & Refining Company — 2.7 mi
• The Baytown Sun — 2.8 mi
• Cedar Bayou Masonic Lodge No. 321, A. F. & A. M. — 2.9 mi